figurable

English

Etymology

figure +‎ -able

Adjective

figurable (comparative more figurable, superlative most figurable)

1. Capable of being brought to a fixed form or shape.
   • 1651, Francis Bacon, Sylva Sylvarum:

     The differences of impressible and not impressible; figurable and not figurable; mouldable and not mouldable; scissile and not scissile; and many other passions of matter, are plebeian notions, applied unto the instruments and uses which men ordinarily practise; but they are all but the effects of some of these causes following, which we will enumerate without applying them, because that would be too long.

   • 1733, Andrew Baxter, An Enquiry Into the Nature of the Human Soul, page 354:

     The same is to be said in other respects; matter is not only figurable and extendible, but de facto figured and extended.

   • 2023, Gwendolyn Marshall, Susanne J. Sreedhar, A New Modern Philosophy:

     Moreover also, the extension of body and spirit, according to their notion, infinitely differ; for whatsoever extension a body hath, the same is so necessary and essential to it, that it is impossible for it to be more or less extended, when nevertheless a spirit may be more or less extended; as they affirm; and seeing to be moveable and figurable, are only consequential attributes of extension, (for that a spirit is far otherwise moveable and figurable than a body, because a spirit can move and form it self as a body cannot;) the same reason which is good against the one is good against the other also.

   figurable substrate

   Lead is figurable, but water is not.

2. Capable of being figural or emblematic.
   • 1873, Sara S. Hennell, Present Religion: as a Faith Owning Fellowship with Thought, page 421:

     On the terms of what is here held a true Philosophy, the Self-regulating ability of an habitual oscillation between Objectiveness and Subjectivity, which produres for us our culminating faculty of Philosophy, is so truly the real fulcrum to all lower menal function, that it seems the fair substitute which justifies, in its repeating them, the old dogmas of Free-Will and Spontaneity (pp.238-40 ) : since the concentrated energy implied in such fulcrum is as naturally figurable for Self-energy, "free" of any cognizable regulation on it, as thence it is figurable for "spontaneous".

   • 1999, Frances A. Yates, Giordano Bruno and the Hermetic Tradition, page 309:

     Nox is the daughter of Orcus and so one of the three infigurables; but through reason she becomes the most ancient of the gods, and in this aspect is figurable. She stands for the materia prima, and as a goddess can have a figurable statue, an old woman, wearing black clothes, with black wings of immense extent.

   • 2001, Louis Marin, On Representation, page 58:

     There, it seems to me, is a major axis for research in art history and theory that encounters psychoanalysis: these latent figures hidden by the great works as their secret truth; a latent figure, a sort of figurable latency, the figurable aspect of a painting, a tension in the figure of the work which something decisive may eventually play itself out on the side of the creator.

   • 2008, George E. Haggerty, Molly McGarry, A Companion to Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender, and Queer Studies, page 175:

     However, this attempt to distance Jewishness from homosexuals is, I suggest, an implicit recognition that the two identity positions are too proximate and, moreover, that their proximity is figurable in relation to camp — figurable, even, as the “essence” of camp.

   • 2010, Violetta L. Waibel, J. Daniel Breazeale, Tom Rockmore, Fichte and the Phenomenological Tradition, page 329:

     And yet, the entirety of Fichte's philosophy may be read as a critique of representation. Indeed, Fichte questions Kant's equation, according to which to know is to represent, and to represent is to make the object “figurable”.

3. Able to be imagined; conceivable.
   • 2006, Thomas O’Donnell, I Am Who I Am: An Autobiography of God, page 21:

     Remember: figuring out the un-figurable is the ultimate oxymoron.

   • 2014, Shirin Deylami, Jonathan Havercroft, The Politics of HBO's The Wire: Everything is Connected, page 118:

     We never fully understand his motivations either, and this is the point: Jimmy's actions, like Kima's, and like most people's, are ouside of easily figurable modes of understanding.

   • 2014, Michael Denning, Cover Stories:

     To become figurable –that is to say, visible in the first place, accessible to our imaginations –the classes have to be able to become in some sense characters in their own right.

   • 2015, Susan J. Wolfson, Marshall Brown, Reading for Form, page 278:

     As the irreversible law behind the linearity of narrative time, Historical Necessity is therefore figurable only, not plottable, and figurable by the very form of novelistic totality.

   • 2016, Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, Gottfried Wilhelm Freiherr von Leibniz, Georg Ernst Stahl, The Leibniz-Stahl Controversy, page 311:

     Since the term 'imagination,' absolutely in a grammatical sense, means a certain, definite idea, that is, an affection of the mind, representative or implying a representation, in the same way I acknowledge that nothing physical, or even in any sense moral, could be conceived by the mind, or could be understood precisely, if not by means of a figurable example: and not only, as they say in the schools, concretely, but especially individually: for at the lowest degree, this can be done vaguely and even fictitiously by an arbitrary representation, which is nevertheless figuarable or imaginable.

   • 2019, John Schostak, Ivor F. Goodson, Democracy, Education and Research: The Struggle for Public Life, page 67:

     The great richness of language(s) then provides the ever re-figurable ground that provides thought and speaking with their resources for debate. With each figurable form a reading-trace sets aside one legible thing from another, a visible from an invisible, a real from an unreal, a sensible from a senseless, a figure from a background.

   figurable entity

   figurable term