Word of the Day:
antinomy
What It Means
A contradiction within a law, or between different laws; also, a contradiction between authorities.
Any contradiction or paradox.
In the thought of the German philosopher Immanuel Kant (1724–1804): an apparent contradiction between valid conclusions; a paradox.
Antinomy in Context
“Of the work that has been done on the liar antinomy, possibly the most profound and certainly the most influential has been that of Tarski”
Did You Know?
Learned borrowing from Latin antinomia, from Ancient Greek ἀντινομία (antinomía), from ἀντι- (anti-, prefix meaning ‘against’) (ultimately from Proto-Indo-European *h₂ent- (“face; forehead; front”)) + νόμος (nómos, “custom, usage; law, ordinance”) + -ῐ́ᾱ (-ĭ́ā, suffix forming feminine abstract nouns), with νόμος (nómos) derived from νέμω (némō, “to deal out, dispense, distribute”) (from Proto-Indo-European *nem- (“to distribute; to give; to take”)) + -ος (-os, suffix forming nouns indicating actions or their results). The English word may be analysed as anti- (prefix meaning ‘against; opposite of’) + -nomy (suffix indicating a system of laws, rules, or knowledge about a body of a particular field).
Source and license
Adapted from Wiktionary: antinomy (page history and authors). Text available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 license. Word.ws chose the word and reformatted its meaning, examples and origin.
Cite this entry: “antinomy.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/antinomy. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.
