adjective
definition
(of speech or writing) Tending to digress from the main point; rambling.
definition
Using reason and argument rather than intuition.
Examples of discursive in a Sentence
In 1878 he dug unsuccessfully in Ithaca, and in the same year and the following resumed work at Hissarlik, and summed up his results in a discursive memoir, Ilios, upon which a sequel, Troja, issued in 1884, after Wilhelm D6rpfeld, associated in 1882, had introduced some archaeological method into the explorations, was a considerable improvement.
Demosthenes has at command all the discursive brilliancy which fascinates a festal audience.
He was, for his time, a voluminous as well as a very discursive writer.
It is discursive and badly arranged, but it is marked by a power of style, a vigour of narrative, and a skill in delineation of character which give life to the most unattractive period of German history; notwithstanding the extreme spirit of partisanship and some faults of taste, it will remain a remarkable monument of literary ability.
The source of all our knowledge is experience and discursive thought, which manipulates the materials of sense.
Clement is exceedingly discursive, and his letter reaches twice the length of the Epistle to the Hebrews.
Two years afterwards the greatest man born since the death of Shakespeare paid homage to the greatest of his predecessors in a volume of magnificent and discursive eloquence which bore the title of William Shakespeare, and might, as its author admitted and suggested, more properly have been entitled A propos de Shakespeare.
In mastery of prose language he has never been surpassed, when he chose to curb his florid imagination and his discursive eagerness of soul.
Even greater was the support it received later on from the Puranas, a class of poetical works of a partly legendary, partly discursive and controversial character, mainly composed in the interest of special deities, of which eighteen principal (maha-purana) and as many secondary ones (upa-purana) are recognized, the oldest of which may go back to about the 4th century of our era.
In 1822 he published in the Morning Chronicle (April) a letter against Canning's attack on Lord John Russell, and edited, or rather re-wrote, some discursive papers of Bentham, which he published under the title Analysis of the Influence of Natural Religion on the Temporal Happiness of Mankind by Philip Beauchamp (1822).
The romance which has here been utilized shows an acquaintance with Egypt; the narratives are discursive, not laconic, everything is more detailed, and more under the influence of literary art.
From this rare personal reminiscence we see at a glance that the mind of Plato and the mind of Aristotle were son, different, that their philosophies must diverge'; the one towards the supernatural, the abstract, the discursive, and the other towards thenatural, the substantial, the scientific.
He was Hulsean lecturer at Cambridge in 1841-1842, and steadily built up a reputation as scholar and preacher, which would have been enhanced but for his discursive ramblings in the fields of minor poetry and magazine editing.
Rather it is a collection of feelings and perspectives, sometimes discursive, occasionally acerbic, invariably provocative.
In this sense the discursive or ideational is only ever relatively autonomous of the material.
It is a fundamentally discursive environment which takes the asynchronous discussion board as its central tool.
Power was once largely discursive, But it now is largely informational.
The style is highly discursive, leap-frogging forward and backward across the decades, without ever sacrificing thrust or clarity.
His tone is often discursive, distinctly American, and always deftly directed toward each poem's purposes.
This form of activity is characterized by a high degree of discursive saturation.
His work, the Kitab ul-Bayan wat-Tabyin, a discursive treatise on rhetoric, has been published in two volumes at Cairo (1895).
There too a system of thought can be reconstituted only on the basis of a definite discursive totality.
With Light Reading, they created an environment which encouraged artists and viewers alike to become actively discursive within an intimate yet public arena.
If we set aside such transcendental conditions as belong to sensibility or to the receptive phase of mind and are the presuppositions of juxtaposition of parts, the remainder are ascribable to spontaneity or understanding, to thought with its unifying, organizing or focussing function, and their elucidation is the problem of transcendental analytic. It is still logic, indeed, when we are occupied with the transcendent objects of the discursive faculty as it is employed beyond the limits of experience where it cannot validate its ideas.
His research focuses on the nature and causes of political violence, and in particular, the discursive construction of war and counter-terrorism.
In our practice, the Giant becomes discursive, historically contingent, an oratorical procedure.
Mitchell's piece on identities in Asia Minor is rather discursive, but all the better for it.
It is discursive in its style and verbose; but, considering the period at which it appeared, it is remarkable for the strong common sense displayed by the author, his comparative freedom from prejudice, and his firm application of the methods of scientific reasoning to the interpretation of phenomena.
This, we saw, is particularly true of philosophy which is thoroughly discursive.