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e or a judge, but esp. that of a professor; hence, the office itself. The chair of a philosophical school. Whewell. A chair of philology. M. Arnold.

aw, or purpose; fortune; fate; -- in this sense often personifed. It is strictly and philosophically true in nature and reason that there is no such thing as chance or accident; it being evident that these words do not signify anything really existing, anything that is truly an agent or the cause of any event; but they…

or question; -- specifically applied to legal proceedings; trickery; chicanery; caviling; sophistry. Prior. To shuffle from them by chicane. Burke. To cut short this, I propound it fairly to your own canscience. Berkeley.

n or unfair artifice to perplex a cause and obscure the truth; stratagem; sharp practice; sophistry. Irritated by perpetual chicanery. Hallam.

ds. L'Estrange. To chop logic, to dispute with an affected use of logical terms; to argue sophistically.

y skin. Ps. cii. 5. The diseases of Egypt . . . shall cleave unto thee. Deut. xxviii. 60. Sophistry cleaves close to and protects Sin's rotten trunk, concealing its defects. Cowper.

Learning; also, a learned profession. [Obs.] Sophictry . . . rhetoric, and other cleargy. Guy of Warwick. Put their second sons to learn some clergy. State Papers (1515).

Characterized by collusion; done or planned in collusion. "Collusive and sophistical arguings." J. Trapp. "Collusive divorces." Strype.

A combination; a complex. [Archaic] This paragraph is . . . a complexion of sophisms. Coleridge.

ert; to oppose; to dispute. The people . . . contested not what was done. Locke. Few philosophical aphorisms have been more frequenty repeated, few more contested than this. J. D. Morell.

A caption or sophistical mode of arguing. [R.]

t Cynics were noted for austere lives and their scorn for social customs and current philosophical opinions. Hence the term Cynic symbolized, in the popular judgment, moroseness, and contempt for the views of others.

act or truth which is decisively attested or intuitively known as a psychological or philosophical datum; as, the deliverance of consciousness.

itical or other practical concerns the abstract doctrines or the theories of his own philosophical system; a propounder of a new set of opinions; a dogmatic theorist. Used also adjectively; as, doctrinaire notions.

ct, correct, arrange, etc., the matter of, for publication; as, to edit a newspaper. Philosophical treatises which have never been edited. Enfield.

A specious but fallacious argument; a sophism.

r experience; depending upon the observation of phenomena; versed in experiments. In philosophical language, the term empirical means simply what belongs to or is the product of experience or observation. Sir W. Hamilton. The village carpenter . . . lays out his work by empirical rules learnt in his apprenticeship. H.…

The philosophical theory which attributes the origin of all our knowledge to experience.

To attempt to escape; to practice artifice or sophistry, for the purpose of eluding. The ministers of God are not to evade and take refuge any of these . . . ways. South.

on of general knowledge; -- opposed to intuitionists. Experientialism is in short, a philosophical or logical theory, not a philosophical one. G. C. Robertson.