Definitions

from The Century Dictionary.

  • noun An act of appetite; desire; craving.

from the GNU version of the Collaborative International Dictionary of English.

  • noun Desire; a longing for, or seeking after, something.

from Wiktionary, Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License.

  • noun A desire, longing for, or seeking after of something.

Etymologies

from Wiktionary, Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License

From Latin appetītiō ("a longing for or desire").

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Examples

  • At the moment I am leaning towards another concept from Whitehead to describe the processual dimension of this complex causality, what he called 'appetition'.

    event mechanics 2009

  • Rhetoric is that "which creates an informed appetition for the good."

    Definitions of Rhetoric 2010

  • Naturalism is the universe in which all relations are natural and in which spiritual life is reduced to the level of desire and appetition.

    Matthew Yglesias » Before There Was Early Rawls… 2007

  • The basis of this accusation was Leibniz's attribution to the soul of only two basic faculties: perception, the representation of multiplicity in a simple soul, and appetition, which he defines as

    Kant and Leibniz Wilson, Catherine 2008

  • Yet the pre-established harmony was at least consistent with Leibniz's claim that substances do not interact with one another and that what we call “causal interaction” does not involve a flow of power or force, but merely a regular sequence of changes in two observable things, in the case of mind and body, the experiences of perception and appetition and states of the sensory organs (G 4: 76-7.)

    Kant and Leibniz Wilson, Catherine 2008

  • The activity, or appetition, that Leibniz regards as characterizing the monads is intimately bound up with his Principle of Sufficient Reason.

    Continental Rationalism Lennon, Thomas M. 2007

  • The last two paragraphs have helped to clarify appetition.

    Leibniz's Philosophy of Mind Kulstad, Mark 2007

  • More generally, he discusses in depth the nature of perception and thought (conscious and unconscious), and of human motivation and striving (or, as he would say, appetition).

    Leibniz's Philosophy of Mind Kulstad, Mark 2007

  • One way to think of this is that each substance has a unique series of perceptions programmed by God to play in harmony with all other substances, and the internal tendency of a substance to move from perception to perception is its active force, or what Leibniz also calls appetite or appetition.

    Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz Look, Brandon C. 2007

  • In other words, every individual substance can be thought to have a set of perceptions and appetitions such that one could say that, at any given time, a particular substance was experiencing such-and-such a perception and such-and-such a appetition.

    Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz Look, Brandon C. 2007

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