Definition of "qua" in English

preposition

1. (chiefly philosophy) as; in the capacity of; acting as

   • As anatomy, physiology and, later, psychology have developed into more or less well-organized sciences, they have necessarily and rightly come to incorporate the study of, among other things, the structures, mechanisms, and functionings of animal and human bodies qua percipient.
   • For sleep qua sleep has no experiential content: it cannot turn out, as remarked before, that a man was not asleep because he was not having some experience or other. I am denying that a dream qua dream is a seeming, appearance or ‘semblance of reality’.
   • 2005: Ulfelder, Jay.Collective Action and the Breakdown of Authoritarian Regimes. International Political Science Review, 26(3), p318. Retrieved 1615 240810 from http://www.jstor.org/stable/pdfplus/30039035.pdf?acceptTC=true. "In essence, military regimes are autocracies in which the military qua organization performs many of the functions performed by the ruling party in single-party regimes."
   • 2009: Ken Levy, Killing, Letting Die, and the Case for Mildly Punishing Bad Samaritanism, Georgia Law Review, p. 24. Blame qua attitude is the feeling or belief that an individual has committed a wrongdoing, usually a wrongful action and/or harm, and can be reasonably expected not to have committed this wrongdoing. Blame qua practice is the public expression of this attitude – usually by means of censure (written or verbal criticism) or punishment. Generally, the morally worse the wrongdoing, the more severe the censure/punishment.

interjection

1. The cawing sound of a crow.