Checking saved dictionary data and trusted language sources. This will stop automatically if a source does not respond.
/ˈfɪlɪstaɪn/ · noun
(derogatory) A person who is ignorant or uneducated; specifically, a person who lacks appreciation of or is antagonistic towards art or culture, and who has pedestrian tastes..
[W]hen he [Christoph Friedrich Nicolai] wrote against [Immanuel] Kant's philosophy, without comprehending it; and judged of poetry as he judged of Brunswick mum, by its utility, many people thought him wrong. A man of such spiritual habilitudes is now by the Germans called a Philister, Philistine: Nicolai earned for himself the painful pre-eminence of being Erz-Philister, Arch-Philistine. [...] At present the literary Philistine seldom shows, never parades, himself in Germany; and when he does appear, he is in the last stage of emaciation.
Not only was he [Heinrich Heine] not one of Mr. [Thomas] Carlyle's "respectable" people, he was profoundly disrespectable; and not even the merit of not being a Philistine can make up for a man's being that.
If it were not for this purging effect wrought upon our minds by culture, the whole world, the future as well as the present, would inevitably belong to the Philistines.
Even the most pig-headed vestry-man feels that something unpleasant has been said about him when he has been called a Philistine, though he may have the vaguest possible conception of its precise meaning. [...] It is used so vaguely by people who are themselves Philistines of the deepest dye, that it is in danger of losing its meaning.
Mr. [Matthew] Arnold has no patience with the middle-class ‘Philistines’ the dullards and haters of light, who care only for what is material and practical.
"Oh, the Philistine! The boorish Philistine!" he murmured; [...]
In politics this type of philistine has more than once denounced the "golden rule" as an "iridescent dream" of a lunatic. Such philistinism pleases the misoneism of the mediocre, whence the enthusiasm over platitudes and the reign of the philistine in newspaper art, literature and science.
The object of such an aesthetic education is not the creation of a society of aesthetes. Aesthetes, in that pejorative sense, are as unbalanced as philistines.
Use philistine when its meaning, tone and grammar fit the full sentence. A synonym is not always a direct replacement.
Philistine means (derogatory) A person who is ignorant or uneducated; specifically, a person who lacks appreciation of or is antagonistic towards art or culture, and who has pedestrian tastes..
Common synonyms include heathen, philistinic, philistinish, anti-intellectual.
The opposite depends on the specific sense.
[W]hen he [Christoph Friedrich Nicolai] wrote against [Immanuel] Kant's philosophy, without comprehending it; and judged of poetry as he judged of Brunswick mum, by its utility, many people thought him wrong. A man of such spiritual habilitudes is now by the Germans called a Philister, Philistine: Nicolai earned for himself the painful pre-eminence of being Erz-Philister, Arch-Philistine. [...] At present the literary Philistine seldom shows, never parades, himself in Germany; and when he does appear, he is in the last stage of emaciation.
FreeDictionaryAPI.com / Wiktionary · Original source · CC BY-SA 4.0
Dictionary data is provided by FreeDictionaryAPI.com and sourced from Wiktionary under its stated license.