Sentence examples for merely ideal from inspiring English sources

In a friendly gesture, Ozick points out to Mr. Berkeley that he has the same name as Bishop Berkeley, the eighteenth-century idealist who, according to Boswell, told Samuel Johnson that matter doesn't really exist — that the world is "merely ideal".

The phenomenal world of objects bearing spatial and causal relations is merely ideal.

Bodies are accorded an enhanced degree of reality (in comparison to merely ideal entities) because they are well founded on the reality of monads.

In Chisholm's example it is easier to accept that telling is merely ideal, but not required, since it is easy to interpret Chisholm's example as one where giving advanced notice is what the agent perhaps ought to do, but not something the agent must do (even assuming the neighborly help is itself a must).

Leaving aside the monadology, as he does in his correspondence with Clarke, this means that for Leibniz, it is physical objects that are real things; space and time are merely "ideal" or abstract entities whose continuity and homogeneity signal this special status.

The freedom and unity that July 3 and July 4 commemorate are not merely ideals; they are states of being.

Again, however, there is a scholarly dispute as to whether the aforementioned specifications are merely an ideal or an actual description.

They are real and the time that relates us to history is not merely the ideal form that Kant had exposited.

Yet at the same time, according to the second concern, the Refutation is inadequate even if its ambition is restricted to demonstrating the existence of merely metaphysically ideal but nonetheless recognition-transcendent objects outside us in space.

Alternatively, perhaps a norm that is merely an ideal cannot be violated, in which case perhaps norms that have been violated can be distinguished (as a subset) from norms that have not been complied with, and then the notion of an obligation as something that must obtain unless some norm is violated will not be obviously circular.

Without this empirical and descriptive component, democratic norms become merely empty ideals and not the reconstruction of the rationality inherent in actual practices.