# antiphysical
## English
### Etymology

From anti- +‎ physical.

### Adjective

antiphysical (comparative more antiphysical, superlative most antiphysical)
* Contrary to nature; unnatural;
** 1908, Alex Hill, The Body at Work: A Treatise on the Principles of Physiology, page 206:According to all the laws of hydrostatics, the water which flows into a brewery should leave it through its drains. Its exit in barrels on drays is antiphysical.
** 1986, Vladimir Naumovich Zharkov, Interior Structure of the Earth and Planets, page 195:Quaternionics was in its vectorial aspects antiphysical and unnatural, and did not harmonize with common scalar mathematics.
** 2011, James Redford, The Physics of God and the Quantum Gravity Theory of Everything, page 77:The antiphysical suggestion of aluminum is at any rate a red herring, since even if we fancifully imagine that it is aluminum, the only way it could have gotten to glow so brightly is with a considerable amount of extremely powerful incendiary.
** 2011, Markku Salmela, Jarkko Toikkanen, The Grotesque and the Unnatural:If one does not consider the movement in the representation, it appears as an antiphysical representation, the opposite of nature. But if one considers the creative impulse that melds one form into another, one sees nature itself as a growing and developing force.
** 2014, Allen Jayne, Jefferson's Declaration of Independence, page 98:The continuing impact on Jefferson of Reid's antiskepticism and that of his followers is clear in a statement he made to John Adams in 1820: "Rejecting all organs of information, therefore, but my senses, I rid myself of the pyrrhonisms with which an indulgence in speculations hyperphysical and antiphysical, so uselessly occupy and disquiet the mind .
** (obsolete) Homosexual
*** 1794, Charles Pigott, The Female Jockey Club: Or a Sketch of the Manners of the Age, page 22:She atchieved a transitory victory over the antiphysical appetites of the late king of Sweden, and for a time inspired him with a desire of natural pleasures;
*** 1896, John Addington Symonds, A Problem in Modern Ethics, page 18:A violent animus against antiphysical passions makes him exaggerate these dangers, for it is clear that normal vice is no less free from sordid demoralisation and crimes of violence than its abnormal twin-brother.
*** 1996, Jeffrey Merrick, Bryant T. Ragan Jr., Homosexuality in Modern France, page 23:Only toward the end of the novel is antiphysical sexuality finally discussed explicitly, in a speech by Mme Bois-Laurier. Bois-Laurier hates antiphysical men, " those execrable enemies of our sex, "but she obviously does not feel quite the same way about sapphic love, having tried for some time to get Thérèse into bed with her.
*** 2015, S. Brady, John Addington Symonds (1840-1893) and Homosexuality:"In the numerous books," says M. Carlier, "which treat of prostitution, the antiphysical passions have hitherto been always deliberately omitted . […] "
* Nonphysical; abstract, mental, intellectual, or spiritual.
** 1888 December 8, Garrick Mallery, Philosophy and Specialties:This superannuated scholasticism has been generally called metaphysical from the order of Aristotle's works, but is more properly antiphysical.
** 2002, James Wm McClendon, Systematic Theology: Volume 1 - Volume 1, page 139:It will be of some help to us in understanding de Rougemon't thesis if we have a clear sense of this romantic tradition with its curiously antiphysical understanding of sexual love and eros.
** 2013, Calvin Thomas, Ten Lessons in Theory: An Introduction to Theoretical Writing, page 130:Because theorists like Žižek see Hegel's dialectic as anticipating and making possible Lacan's "antiphysical" take on language, because Žižek believes that “ the Hegelian dialectic begins with a chasm opened up between words and things " (Johnston 2008: 263), it's interesting to note the similarity between what Hegel says here about "the principle of self-movement" and what we earlier saw Lacan say bout the movement of the signifier—"The signifier is a unique unit of being which, by its very nature, is the symbol of but an absence.
** 2010, Steve Holmes, Murray Rae, Lindsey Hall, Christian Doctrine, page 109:It is possible to speculate that if Christianity had begun in a culture less dualistic and antiphysical than that of the first-century Mediterranean world, it might have been willing, given the more holistic anthropology and theology of its Hebraic roots, to extend its body metaphor to God.
* Repulsed by the physical.
** 2011, T. Cattoi, J. McDaniel, Perceiving the Divine through the Human Body:The important works of Peter Brown, Carolyn Walker Bynum, and others have demonstrated that Christian asceticism is not necessarily antiphysical and misogynistic.
** 2013, Bampfylde Fuller, The Law Within, page 71:The rules of decency and modesty arose out of antiphysical repugnances to physical functions that seemed to humiliate human dignity.
** 2016, Susan Brooks Thistlethwaite, Women's Bodies as Battlefield:Inevitably, that justification of the use of state force affects the Christian ethos profoundly, moving it inexorably toward greater support for power inequality, hierarchy, and a further contempt for the body (though there are antiphysical sentiments in groups like the Montanists in the earlier centuries that are also pacifist).