# nonism
## English

* This entry needs quotations to illustrate usage. If you come across any interesting, durably archived quotes then please add them!

### Etymology

(This etymology is missing or incomplete. Please add to it, or discuss it at the Etymology scriptorium.)

### Pronunciation

* This entry needs pronunciation information. If you are familiar with the IPA or enPR then please add some!
* This entry needs an audio pronunciation. If you are a native speaker with a microphone, please record this word. The recorded pronunciation will appear here when it's ready.

### Noun

nonism (uncountable)
* The abstention from harmful activities, foods, and so on.
* (philosophy) The stance that the nature of reality is unknowable because all information comes through the senses, which are unreliable.
** 1904, The Hartford Seminary Record - Volume 14, page 238:Neo-Platonism "tended to break the unity of life and thought which Christianity sought to establish," yet withal it prevented a too "facile nonism."
** 1987 July, Sajahan Miah, “Russell's Theory of Perception (1905-1919)”, in Philosophy Dissertation at McMaster University:But it surely affects his theory of perception in that, with the espousal of neutral nonism, he had to abandon the sense-datum theory because he abandoned the relational character of sensation consisting of a subject and an object ie, a sense-datum.
** 1997, Peter McWilliams, Life 101: Everything We Wish We Had Learned about Life in School - But Didn't, →ISBN, page 22:Shakespeare, of course, called life "a poor player, that struts and frets his hour upon the stage..." and James Thurber continued: "It's a tale told in an idiom, full of unsoundness and fury, signifying nonism."
** 2008, Frédéric Vandenberghe, A Philosophical History of German Sociology, →ISBN:I share Simmel's dialectical “neither-nor” position (not monism, but nonism), as formulated in the regulating principle of methodological pluralism: neither idealism, nor materialism, nor elementarism, nor emergentism. Taken individually, each of the metatheoretical permutation and theoretical positions based on them are insufficient, for each is biased; as a whole, however, they make it possible to construct a general, global and multidimensional theory of society.
* (philosophy) The denial of higher-level meaning beyond physical existence; materialism.
** 1906, The American Educational Review - Volume 27, Issue 10, page 519:Sir Oliver's standing as a scientist makes his book interesting as a statement of the reasons a scientist can give in opposition to the conclusions of materialistic nonism.
** 1938, Willard Harrell, Ross Harrison, “The rise and fall of behaviorism”, in The Journal of general psychology, volume 18, number 2:That philosophy of the relation of psyche and soma which may be called materialistic nonism, the philosophy most congenial to behaviorists, was as ancient as Greek thought.
* (philosophy) The belief in the existence of entities and events within a domain that can only be defined in terms of what it is not.
** 2007 August 9, Neal Judisch, “Why ‘non-mental’ won’t work: on Hempel’s dilemma and the characterization of the ‘physical’”, in Philosophical Studies, volume 140, number 3, →DOI:Not really: fundamentality is a red herring, and the proponents of nonism have avoided Hempel’s dilemma only at the cost of emptying their position of any distinctives that might give the anti-physicalist reason to reject it (which, naturally, is not to say that the anti-physicalist should accept it).

#### Related terms

* nonist

### Anagrams

* Inmons, Minson, mo'nin's