thinkableadj.n.

1764 tr. Mme de Sévigné Lett. (ed. 2) II. lxxii. 5 I content myself with all that is writeable, and I think all that is thinkable [Fr. je rêve tout ce qui se peut rêver].

1865 T. Carlyle Hist. Friedrich II of Prussia VI. xx. vi. 151 How charming that you should make thinkable to us..what we were all inclined to think.

1908 Times 10 Sept. 8/4 It is thinkable that considerate driving may render legal enactments unnecessary.

1961 G. F. Kennan Russia & West iv. 55 Was it thinkable, it was asked, that a workers' government should accept aid from capitalist governments?

1980 I. Englard in B. S. Jackson Mod. Res. in Jewish Law 63 The owner is not permitted to use his property in every thinkable way without limitation.

2005 R. Whitinger tr. L. Andreas-Salomé Human Family 28 Is it thinkable then that the moment he had witnessed remained the only one of its kind?

1786 A. Gib Καινα και Παλαια: Sacred Contempl. 84 The infinite One, who can have no succession of ideas or thoughts in his mind, but at once thinks all that is thinkable.

1854 H. Spencer in Brit. Q. Rev. July 137 A corresponding progress in language, by which greater varieties of objects are thinkable and expressible.

1883 H. Drummond Nat. Law in Spiritual World (1884) Introd. 3 To marshal the discrete materials..into thinkable form.

1911 Mind 20 75 No ‘and’ which is purely external is thinkable.

1957 Philos. & Phenomenol. Res. 17 305 If Being is to include Non-Being also, then its field will be nothing else than that of what may be called thinkable or nameable.

2003 Law & Lit. 15 296 Things perceptible by the senses as distinct from things thinkable or immaterial, that is to say the product of ‘logic’.

1852 E. Dallas Poetics III. i. i. 111 The True, the Beautiful, and the Good are three ideas that fill the whole sphere of the thinkable.

1890 W. James Princ. Psychol. I. xiii. 529 As ‘thinkables’ or ‘existents’ even the smoke of a cigarette and the worth of a dollar-bill are comparable.

1907 W. James Pragmatism iv. 140 Absolute generic unity would obtain if there were one summum genus under which all things without exception could be eventually subsumed. ‘Beings’, ‘thinkables’, ‘experiences’, would be candidates for this position.

1944 Jrnl. Philos. 41 255 In saying that there are non-existent objects we mean to distinguish between being and existence. Being includes all thinkables; existence is a narrower sphere.

2002 Isis 93 299/2 There are some faults: a failure to engage with the latest Scotist scholarship on the question of the relation between the possible and the thinkable (representable).

1860 W. Fleming Vocab. Philos. at Denkbarkeit Thinkableness; Capacity of being thought.

1895 A. J. Balfour Found. Belief 286 ‘Ultimate’ scientific ideas may be unthinkable without prejudice to the ‘thinkableness’ of ‘proximate’ scientific ideas.

1929 H. W. Garrod Profession of Poetry 17 The unity of a work of art is proportionate to the thinkableness, or reasonableness, of its subject.

1958 W. D. Geoghegan Platonism in Recent Relig. Thought i. 21 Inge commends Aliotta's defense of the Platonic categories as really fundamental and essential to the thinkableness of any experience.

1976 Amer. Jrnl. Nursing 76 832/3 The authors assume the reader has been ‘introduced to the topic of death..needs no convincing of its importance or “thinkableness”’.

1903 H. James Ambassadors iv. 59 He judged the quantity as small because it was small, and all the more egregiously so since it couldn't, as he saw the case, so much as thinkably have been larger.

1935 Mind 44 325 For finitists, ‘to exist’ means ‘to be thinkably constructible’.

1966 Listener 9 June 840/3 Death is thinkably of two sorts—(i) the physical break~up of animate entities,..and (ii) our own projected death.

2003 New Yorker 24 Mar. 69/1 Leading composers, he says, ‘never get farther than abstract negation, and take off on an empty, high-spirited trip, through thinkably complex scores, in which nothing actually occurs’.