prescind

present singular third person prescinds · participle present prescinding · participle past prescinded · past prescinded

1. intransitiveTo abstract (from); to dismiss from consideration.

   But one cannot prescind from humanity. There can be no renewal of our relationship with nature without a renewal of humanity itself.

   2015, Pope Francis I, Laudato Si': Encyclical Letter on care for our common home

   1 more example

   In making real-world contracts with someone else, for whatever purpose, we expressly prescind from the other party's personal, private motivation. I may agree to mow your lawn for ten dollars because I like mowing lawns, because it is the only skill I possess, because it is the only skill that anyone else is willing to purchase from me, and so endlessly on. But all you can demand from me is a mown lawn

   1998 Fall, Alan Ryan, “In a Conversational Idiom.”, in Social Research, volume 65, number 3, pages 473–489

2. transitiveTo pay exclusive attention to.

   1 more example

   The result of Attention, by concentrating the mind upon certain qualities, is thus to withdraw or abstract it from all else. In technical language, we are said to prescind the phenomena which we exclusively consider. To prescind, to attend, and to abstract, are merely different but correlative names for the same process; and the first two are nearly convertible. When we are said to prescind a quality, we are merely supposed to attend to that quality exclusively.

   c. 1838, Sir William Hamilton, 9th Baronet, edited by Henry Longueville Mansel and John Veitch, Lectures on Logic (Lectures on Metaphysics and Logic; volume 3), Blackwood, published 1860