Word Finder - volition

definition

A conscious choice or decision.

definition

The mental power or ability of choosing; the will.

example

Out of all the factors that can influence a person’s decision, none can match the power of his or her own volition.

definition

A concept that distinguishes whether or not the subject or agent intended something.

The top opened of its own volition, revealing an aged stone dagger with dulled edges and a chipped stone hilt.

Both cognition and volition are functions of thought as well as forms of moral action.

This is the element of spontaneity in volition and in reason.

Her arms slid around his neck of their own volition and she eagerly returned his kiss.

Yet this primordial creative nature is endowed with volition with regard to its own development.

The French soldiers went to kill and be killed at the battle of Borodino not because of Napoleon's orders but by their own volition.

Once applied to the facts at all, it would drive us beyond the first antecedent or term of antecedents of volition to a still further cause or ground - in fact, land us in an infinite regress of causes.

A man is only conscious of himself as a living being by the fact that he wills, that is, is conscious of his volition.

A free volition is " a causeless volition ".

In ethics the term is used, like indeterminism, to denote the theory that mental change cannot always be ascribed to previously ascertained psychological states, and that volition is not causally related to the motives involved.

Dr. Murray surrendered on his own volition to the Los Angeles police department for his arraignment.

Her arms slid around his neck of their own volition and she pressed close to him passionately returning his affection.

The influence we seem to exercise over bodies by will is only apparent; volition and action only accompany one another.

We are in the realm of human volition, not biological reflex.

Although children eat small objects and stick things into their bodily openings of their own volition, they inhale them unwittingly while choking.

Lost in the food fantasy, she didn't see Gabriel disappear into the jungle.  Katie blinked and looked around, still uneasy with the snakelike branches that moved of their own volition overhead.  She didn't know what kind of creatures followed or what other critters would live in the Immortal jungle, but she wanted nothing to do with such a weird place.

The system of Plotinus, Zellar remarks, is not strictly speaking one of emanation, since there is no communication of the divine essence to the created world; yet it resembles emanation inasmuch as the genesis of the world is conceived as a necessary physical effect, and not as the result of volition.

All forms of monism from Plotinus downwards tend to ignore personal individuality and volition, and merge all finite existence in the featureless unity of the Absolute; this, indeed, is what inspires the passion of the protest against monism.

In 1799 Darwin published his Phytologia, or the Philosophy of Agriculture and Gardening (1799), in which he states his opinion that plants have sensation and volition.

The Government stepped in and appointed a mixed commission of Germans and Czechs, which should, as it were, administer the affairs of this country like a trustee for a person incapable of volition.

The insistence on the validity of personal experience leads Renouvier to a yet more important divergence from Kant in his treatment of volition.

Instead of making the motive to choice a factor within the concrete process of volition, he regards it as a cause antecedent to the exercise of a special mental faculty.

And further, the principle of causality, if fairly carried out, as universal and necessary, would not allow us to stop at personality or will as the ultimate cause of its effect - volition.

Starting from sensation as our basis, causality could never give us this, even though it be allowed that sensation is impersonal to the extent of being independent of our volition.

Sudden, unpremeditated volition may be the earliest and the most artistic, but it is not the best.

It was not wholly by volition and design that his mind was strange to others and worked in absolute detachment.

The true source of change in the material world must be analogous to what we are conscious of when we exert volition.

And supposing it to be replied that the motive is really the moral uneasiness involved in choosing the selfish alternative, Godwin answers that this uneasiness, though a " constant step " in the process of volition, is a merely " accidental " step - " I feel pain in the neglect of an act of benevolence, because benevolence is judged by me to be conduct which it becomes me to adopt."

The former fall into the two classes of feelings (subjective) and perceptions (objective); the latter, according as the receptive or the spontaneous element predominates, into cognition and volition.

Rand explains that men know they have volition through the act of introspection.

These people fail to pause, to consider the situation, options and consequences before exercising volition.

This overlooks any concept of free will or personal volition among users in gaging their level of intoxication.

But in certain contexts there is clearly an element of intention or volition involved.

As if of their own volition, Felice's hands reached for the keyboard and settled there ready for the next command.

Knowledge, or a branch H of knowledge, is in the Theological state, when it supposes the phenomena under consideration to be due to immediate volition, either in the Object or in some supernatural being.

In the Metaphysical state, for volition is substituted abstract force residing in the object, yet existing independently of the object; the phenomena are viewed as if apart from the bodies manifesting them; and the properties of each substance have attributed to them an existence distinct from that substance.

In ethics he made contributions to the science in regard to the place and functions of volition and attention, the separate and underived character of the moral sentiments, and the distinction between the virtues of perfect and imperfect obligation.

Tylor, the doctrine of spiritual beings, including human souls; in practice, however, the term is often extended to include panthelism or animatism, the doctrine that a great part, if not the whole, of the inanimate kingdom, as well as all animated beings, are endowed with reason, intelligence and volition, identical with that of man.

Thus certain physical changes in the brain result in a given action; the concomitant mental desire or volition is in no sense causally connected with, or prior to, the physical change.

M ` Taggart, who closes his acute Studies in Hegelian Cosmology (rigor) with " the possibility of finding, above all knowledge and volition, one all-embracing unity, which is only not true, only not good, because all truth and all goodness are but distorted shadows of its absolute perfection- ` das Unbegreifliche, weil es der Begriff selbst ist.'

Actions of great complexity and delicacy of adjustment are daily executed by each of us without what is ordinarily understood as volition, and without more than a mere shred of memory attached thereto.

But there is a primary kind of volition which has not reflection for its condition, which is yet free and spontaneous.

Spontaneous volition is free as reflective, but it is the prior act of the two.

This view of liberty of will is the only one in accordance with the facts of humanity; it excludes reflective volition, and explains the enthusiasm of the poet and the artist in the act of creation; it explains also the ordinary actions of mankind, which are done as a rule spontaneously and not after reflective deliberation.

The self is found to be a cause of force, free in its action, on the ground that we are obliged to relate the volition of consciousness to the self as its cause, and its ultimate cause.

Volition is essentially a free choice between alternatives, and that is best which is most deliberate, because it is most rational.

But in Kant's view the universal content of this will is only given in the formal condition of "only acting as one can desire all to act," to be subjectively applied by each rational agent to his own volition; whereas Hegel conceives the universal will as objectively presented to each man in the laws, institutions and customary morality of the community of which he is a member.

Feeling in this higher sense (as distinguished from "organic" sensibility, Empfindung), which is the minimum of distinct antithetic consciousness, the cessation of the antithesis of subject and object, constitutes likewise the unity of our being, in which the opposite functions of cognition and volition have their fundamental and permanent background of personality and their transitional link.

Feeling is not a mental function subordinate to cognition or volition, but of equal rank and authority; yet feeling, cognition and volition alike conduct to faith in the unknown Absolute, though by different paths and processes.

According to this way of thinking, there are also men and women walking among us who are here of their own conscious volition.