Philosophy & ThoughtGreek → English
Antithesis
/ænˈtɪθəsɪs/noun
The exact opposite of something, or a rhetorical figure that sets two contrasting ideas in balanced phrases.
The Greek roots
ἀντί
antí
against, opposite
θέσις
thésis
a placing, position
Literally: “a setting against”
The story of the word
Aristotle treats ἀντίθεσις in the Rhetoric as a matter of sentence shape: two clauses built the same way carrying opposed ideas, which is why the figure survives in slogans. English borrowed it in the 1520s. The famous thesis-antithesis-synthesis triad is not Hegel's phrasing at all; it comes from Fichte and was fixed on Hegel by the historian Chalybäus in the 1830s.
- How it travelled
- Ancient Greek → Latin → English
- First recorded
- 1520s
The same roots elsewhere
Other languages reached for exactly the same Greek pieces.
Same family
thesishypothesissynthesisparenthesis
In a sentence
Her second album is the antithesis of the first: quiet, slow and almost unrecorded.