whatness

That means that it is 'the essential whatness' of a body of the character just assigned.

Horseness is the whatness of allhorse.

"The Whichness of the Whatness"

The agent intellect is also the faculty which abstracts the "whatness" or intelligibility of all sensed objects and stores them in the possible intellect.

My only reservation is that his memoir is perhaps too intellectual, not lyrical enough, too much about ideas and too little about the whatness, the sheer here-and-now of illness.

'To return to your question about the whatness of these things," said the Dog, "we do have a designation for them, but it does not translate into anything I can say to make you understand.

Even the focus of traditional ontology on the 'whatness' or 'quidditas' of beings in their substantial, standing presence can be shifted to pose the question of the 'whoness' of human being itself.

The radiance of which he speaks in the scholastic QUIDDITAS, the WHATNESS of a thing.

Bultman argued that all that matters is the "thatness", not the "whatness" of Jesus, i.e. only that Jesus existed, preached and died by crucifixion matters, not what happened throughout his life.

As it is, it is just an axe; it wants the character which is required to make its whatness or formulable essence a soul; for that, it would have had to be a natural body of a particular kind, viz.

It is more concerned with centering on the action of things, the fluid condition of things, the whatness of things, the open-endedness of things, than it is with formulating prescriptions for proper revolutionary or reactionary behavior.

Suppose that what is literally an 'organ', like an axe, were a natural body, its 'essential whatness', would have been its essence, and so its soul; if this disappeared from it, it would have ceased to be an axe, except in name.

In Thomist philosophy, the definition of a being is "that which is," which is composed of two parts: "which" refers to its quiddity (literally "whatness"), and "is" refers to its esse (the Latin infinitive verb "to be").

("But as soon as the essence of being resides in whatness [idea] , whatness, as the being of the essent, becomes that which is most beingful in an essent" is a not untypical sentence.)

This led medieval logicians to distinguish between what they called the quid nominis or 'whatness of the name', and the underlying nature common to all the things it names, which they called the quid rei or 'whatness of the thing'.

And as no man knows the ubicity of his tumulus nor to what processes we shall thereby be ushered nor whether to Tophet or to Edenville in the like way is all hidden when we would backward see from what region of remoteness the whatness of our whoness hath fetched his whenceness.

Whereas haecceity refers to aspects of a thing which make it a particular thing, quiddity refers to the universal qualities of a thing, its "whatness", or the aspects of a thing which it may share with other things and by which it may form part of a genus of things.