Intelligibles

Part of speech: noun, adjective

Definitions

1. Things capable of being understood or comprehended intellectually; entities that can be grasped by the mind rather than the senses; concepts or objects that are manifest to rational thought
2. Items or concepts that are accessible to human intellect and cognition; ideas or phenomena that can be discerned through reasoning rather than perception; elements grasped by abstract mental processes
3. Objects or notions apprehensible by intellectual faculties; things which can be comprehended or made sense of through cognitive understanding; matters comprehended through thought beyond sensory experience

Etymology: "Intelligibles" comes from Latin "intelligibilis", formed from "intelligere", "to understand", and the suffix "-bilis", "able to be", so the word literally means "able to be understood." Its meaning was shaped largely by Greek philosophy: Plato's term "noeta" and Aristotle's distinction between things perceived by the senses and things grasped by the intellect gave Latin-writing thinkers a way to sort the world into what the eyes and ears detect and what the mind alone can know. Medieval scholastic philosophers adopted the Latin word as a technical term for these mind-grasped objects, and the English noun and adjective followed that philosophical usage. In everyday English the word is now found mostly in philosophical and theological writing, where it names the realm of concepts, forms and truths accessible to reason rather than to the senses.

Synonyms: comprehensibles, understandables

Antonyms: incomprehensibles, unintelligibles