Word.ws English Dictionary

necessitation

necessitation noun: necessity, understood as a logical or other philosophical principle, or as a law or force of nature.

Noun

necessitation (countable and uncountable, plural necessitations)

  1. Necessity, understood as a logical or other philosophical principle, or as a law or force of nature.
    • Moral obligation is not necessitation. The moral law commands but does not coerce us.1894, J. G. Schurman, “The Consciousness of Moral Obligation”, in The Philosophical Review, volume 3, number 6, page 641
    • The voluntary actions of men are now seen to claim an equal freedom from the necessitation of natural causes.1896, J. Clark Murray, “The Idealism of Spinoza”, in The Philosophical Review, volume 5, number 5, page 485

Examples of necessitation in a sentence

  • Determinism is an example: it alleges that all the seeming irregularities and spontaneities in the world are haunted by an omnipresent system of strict necessitation.1957, J. W. N. Watkins, “Between Analytic and Empirical”, in Philosophy, volume 32, number 121, page 114:
  • In virtue of their contents, psychological states stand in logical relations like incompatibility, material implication, and conceptual necessitation.2001, Eric Marcus, “Mental Causation: Unnaturalized but Not Unnatural”, in Philosophy and Phenomenological Research, volume 63, number 1...

Forms of necessitation

pluralnecessitations

Origin of necessitation

From necessitate + -ation.

Questions about necessitation

What does necessitation mean?
Necessitation means necessity, understood as a logical or other philosophical principle, or as a law or force of nature.
How do you use necessitation in a sentence?
Determinism is an example: it alleges that all the seeming irregularities and spontaneities in the world are haunted by an omnipresent system of strict necessitation.
What part of speech is necessitation?
Necessitation is a noun.
What is the plural of necessitation?
The plural of necessitation is necessitations.

Words near necessitation in the dictionary

  1. necessitatedly
  2. necessitates
  3. necessitateth
  4. necessitating
  5. necessitatingly
  6. necessitation
  7. necessitations
  8. necessitative
  9. necessitatives
  10. necessitator
  11. necessitators

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: necessitation (page history and authors). Text available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 license. Word.ws reformatted the entry and added links. Wiktionary data of 2026-09-02.

Last updated:

Cite this entry: “necessitation.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/necessitation. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.