A PRIORI • E-FREE TRANSLATION.COM • Definition of A priori

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A priori phr.

(Logic) Characterizing that kind of reasoning which deduces consequences from definitions formed, or principles assumed, or which infers effects from causes previously known; deductive or deductively. The reverse of a posteriori.

(Philos.) Applied to knowledge and conceptions assumed, or presupposed, as prior to experience, in order to make experience rational or possible. "A priori, that is, form these necessities of the mind or forms of thinking, which, though first revealed to us by experience, must yet have preexisted in order to make experience possible."

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Etymology of 'Priori'

Collaborative International Dictionary of English 0.48

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"A priori" Quotes from Famous Books

... is the a priori case for supposing, what our experience of contemporary life abundantly verifies, that the so-called representative assemblies of the world are not really representative at all. I will go farther and say ...

— An Englishman Looks at the World • H. G. Wells

... sort of weather there is, the length of winter, old age, lack of success in all its forms. But I think that partisans (sincere) ought to change their formulas or find out perhaps the emptiness of every a priori formula. ...

— The George Sand-Gustave Flaubert Letters • George Sand, Gustave Flaubert

... to be good evidence of the great antiquity of the legends recorded by Hesiod. In the first place, arguing merely a priori, it is extremely improbable that in the brief interval between the date of the comparatively pure and noble mythology of the Iliad and the much ruder Theogony of Hesiod men INVENTED stories like the mutilation of Uranus, and the swallowing of his offspring by Cronus. ...

— Myth, Ritual, and Religion, Vol. 1 • Andrew Lang

... labored attempt to refute this ingenious doctrine is needless, since the doctrine itself is but the developed structure of a speculative conception with no valid basis of observed fact. It is a sheer hypothesis, spun out of the self fed bowels of a priori assumption and metaphysic fancy. It solves the problems only by changes of their form, leaving the mysteries as numerous and deep as before. It is a beautiful and sublime piece of latent poetry, the evolution and architecture of which well display the ...

— The Destiny of the Soul - A Critical History of the Doctrine of a Future Life • William Rounseville Alger

... philosophy empirical, so far as it is based on grounds of experience: on the other hand, that which delivers its doctrines from a priori principles alone we may call pure philosophy. When the latter is merely formal it is logic; if it is restricted to definite objects of the understanding it ...

— Literary and Philosophical Essays • Various

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