Definitions
from The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, 5th Edition.
- adjective Regarding humans as the central element of the universe.
- adjective Interpreting reality exclusively in terms of human values and experience.
from The Century Dictionary.
- Regarding man as the central fact of creation; assuming man to be the final aim and end of creation.
from the GNU version of the Collaborative International Dictionary of English.
- adjective Assuming man as the center or ultimate end; -- applied to theories of the universe or of any part of it, as the solar system.
from Wiktionary, Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License.
- adjective Placing
humans at the center of something, giving preference to humans above all other considerations.
from WordNet 3.0 Copyright 2006 by Princeton University. All rights reserved.
- adjective human-centered
Etymologies
from Wiktionary, Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License
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Examples
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For decades, the consensus was that as children begin reasoning about the biological world, they adopt only one -- markedly "anthropocentric" -- vantage point, favoring humans over non-human animals when it comes to learning about properties of animals.
PhysOrg.com - latest science and technology news stories 2010
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Up to now the environmental ethics has been only anthropocentric, that is to say an economics ethics that ignores man's responsibility for nature.
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Many traditional western ethical perspectives, however, are anthropocentric or human-centered in that either they assign intrinsic value to human beings alone (i.e., what we might call anthropocentric in a strong sense) or they assign a significantly greater amount of intrinsic value to human beings than to any nonhuman things such that the protection or promotion of human interests or well-being at the expense of nonhuman things turns out to be nearly always justified (i.e., what we might call anthropocentric in a weak sense).
Environmental Ethics Brennan, Andrew 2008
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Glad your wild bird encounter didn't turn all Hitchcock...which would be just a different kind of anthropocentric nature poem, I guess.
The Mountain, Some Feathers, Strong Looking and Swoops Lemon Hound 2009
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Rather than restoring wild nature, Southern Californians would do better to think of the natural world around them as a large and wonderful set of gardens -- many Central Parks on a much grander scale -- designed by human beings for human aesthetic and other "anthropocentric" purposes, including the tight limitation of fire risks.
Man vs. Wild 2007
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Paul's doctrine is "anthropocentric", that it starts from his conception of man's inability to fulfill the law of God without the help of grace to such an extent that he is a slave of sin and must wage war against the flesh.
The Catholic Encyclopedia, Volume 11: New Mexico-Philip 1840-1916 1913
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For decades, the consensus was that as young children begin reasoning about the biological world, they adopt an "anthropocentric" stance, favoring humans over non-human animals when it comes to learning about properties of animals.
PhysOrg.com - latest science and technology news stories 2010
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They suggest that mainstream environmentalism shares a human-centred, "anthropocentric" stance towards the natural world.
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This sort of reality-show mockumentary interspersed with news footage of the attempted evictions (which see everything from an anthropocentric view, and get so much of the story wrong) is a sort of implicit criticism of the modern media age and how we humans handle themselves.
WATCHING: District 9 darkerblogistan 2009
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We need to abandon the anthropocentric view that only big-brained animals such as ourselves, nonhuman great apes, elephants, and cetaceans dolphins and whales have sufficient mental capacities for complex forms of consciousness.
Marc Bekoff: Animal Minds and the Foible of Human Exceptionalism Marc Bekoff 2011
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