antinomy

Definition

A contradiction within a law, or between different laws; also, a contradiction between authorities.

Etymology

Learned borrowing from Latin antinomia, from Ancient Greek ἀντινομία (antinomía), from ἀντι- (anti-, prefix meaning ‘against’) (ultimately from Proto-Indo-European *h₂ent- (“face; forehead; front”)) + νόμος (nómos, “custom, usage; law, ordinance”) + -ῐ́ᾱ (-ĭ́ā, suffix forming feminine abstract nouns), with νόμος (nómos) derived from νέμω (némō, “to deal out, dispense, distribute”) (from Proto-Indo-European *nem- (“to distribute; to give; to take”)) + -ος (-os, suffix forming nouns indicating actions or their results). The English word may be analysed as anti- (prefix meaning ‘against; opposite of’) + -nomy (suffix indicating a system of laws, rules, or knowledge about a body of a particular field).

Example Sentences

• "The Antinomians: These Gospell-truths, these sweet Sermons of Free-grace, that setting up of naked Christ on his Throne, which hath seduced so many thousands of well-meaning souls, do now appear in their own colours, and to any common eye may be seen to be nothing but the grosse Antinomy of the old Libertines."
• "There is, notwithstanding, a sort of Manicheism in genius, as there is the antinomy in science, as there are light and shade in art, as there are opposite and similarly appearing movements in life, as there are diverse and simultaneous springs in the human conscience, as there are attraction and repulsion in the sidereal worlds, as there are multiferous and heterogeneous forces that resolve themselves into astonishing antithetic duality ."
• "Slowly, the term reveals itself as an expression of fundamental tensions and deep structural antinomies: between the sacred and the profane, purity and impurity, morality and immorality, cleanliness and dirt. In conjoining such primal opposites into a single category, white trash names a kind of disturbing liminality a monstrous, transgressive identity of mutually violating boundary terms, a dangerous threshold state of being neither one nor the other."

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