Dualism
noun ·4 syllables ·Moderate ·College level
Definitions
- 1 Duality; the condition of being double. countable, uncountable
"By breaking free of it, historians could shed the dualisms that now entrap them, and escape the declensionism - the longing for the lost alternative"
- 2 the doctrine that reality consists of two basic opposing elements, often taken to be mind and matter (or mind and body), or good and evil wordnet
- 3 The view that the world consists of, or is explicable in terms of, two fundamental principles, such as mind and matter or good and evil. countable, uncountable
- 4 The belief that the world is ruled by a pair of antagonistic forces, such as good and evil; the belief that man has two basic natures, the physical and the spiritual. countable, uncountable
"The same conflict between the monism of temporal theorists and the dualism of ecclesiastical thinkers—the same opposition of organic to symbiotic union—occurred in the ninth century."
- 5 The legal doctrine that international law must be transposed into domestic law to have effect. countable, uncountable
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- 6 The theory, originated by Lavoisier and developed by Berzelius, that all definite compounds are binary in their nature, and consist of two distinct constituents, themselves simple or complex, and having opposite chemical or electrical affinities. countable, dated, uncountable
Example
More examples"Gnosticism was a religious movement older than Christianity. There were both types of Christian and non-Christian Gnosticism because there was syncretism, or mixing. They believed that humans were trapped in their bodies and in this evil material world that was created by a cosmic disaster, by a malevolent deity who was not Christ. Christian Gnostics believed that Christ was one of the aeons or divine beings from the Pleroma, the Divine Realm, as described in the Apocryphon of John, part of the Nag Hammadi Library of Gnostic literature. Salvation was by esoteric knowledge, although ultimately self-knowledge. Gnostics believed in the dualism of the good spirit and evil matter. The material world was an evil place from where Gnostics had to escape. They believed that not all humans had the Divine Spark. The aeons emanated from the Ultimate God, the Monad in the Pleroma. The origins of Gnosticism are unclear today, but probably it came from Persia or further east. It had a lot of Greek influences. Today, after the discovery of the Nag Hammadi Library as leather-bound papyrus codices in a sealed jar in Egypt, in 1945, some people are trying to revive Gnosticism. "Gnōsis" is Greek for knowledge."
Etymology
From dual + -ism.
Related phrases
More for "dualism"
Data sourced from Wiktionary, WordNet, CMU, and other open linguistic databases. Updated March 2026.