See also: préhension

English edit

Etymology edit

Borrowed from Latin prehensio, prehensionis. Doublet of prison.

Pronunciation edit

Noun edit

prehension (countable and uncountable, plural prehensions)

  1. The act of grasping or gripping, especially with the hands.
  2. (philosophy) According to Alfred North Whitehead, a type of universally acting perception that is not limited to living, self-conscious beings, and which involves an interconnectedness of the observer and the observed.
    • 1981, William Irwin Thompson, The Time Falling Bodies Take to Light: Mythology, Sexuality and the Origins of Culture, London: Rider/Hutchinson & Co., page 214:
      The addiction to punning was related to a reverence for the "Word." In a pun or a hieroglyphic figure, several lines come together in what Whitehead would call "a prehension"; in the comprehension of an event, that sympathetic resonance between the observor and the "thing" observed, there is a correspondence between the cosmic word of the gods (the Logos of St. John) and the inner words of the human mind, for each shares existence because it is a manifestation of divine laws and harmony.

Related terms edit