ellipsis an expression (spoken or written) from which semantically or syntactically essential material has been deleted, usually for conciseness. Elliptical sentences are often used to answer questions without repeating material occurring in the questions. For example, the word ‘Lincoln’ may be an answer to the question of the authorship of the Gettysburg Address or to the question of the birthplace of George Boole. The single word ‘Lincoln’ can be seen as an elliptical name when used as an ellipsis of ‘Abraham Lincoln’, and it can be seen as an elliptical sentence when used as an ellipsis for ‘Abraham Lincoln wrote the Gettysburg Address’. Other typical elliptical sentences are: ‘Abe is a father of two [children]’, ‘Ben arrives at twelve [noon]’. A typical ellipsis that occurs in discussion of ellipses involves citing the elliptical sentences with the deleted material added in brackets (often with ‘sc.’ or ‘scilicet’) instead of also presenting the complete sentence. Ellipsis also occurs above the sentential level, e.g. where well-known premises are omitted in the course of argumentation. The word ‘enthymeme’ designates an elliptical argument expression from which one or more premise-expressions have been deleted. The expression ‘elliptic ambiguity’ designates ambiguity arising from ellipsis. See also AMBIGUITY, ARGUMENT, LOGICAL FOR. J. Cor. emanationism, a doctrine about the origin and ontological structure of the world, most frequently associated with Plotinus and other Neoplatonists, according to which everything else that exists is an emanation from a primordial unity, called by Plotinus ‘the One.’ The first product of emanation from the One is Intelligence (noûs), a realm resembling Plato’s world of Forms. From Intelligence emanates Soul (psuche), conceived as an active principle that imposes, insofar as that is possible, the rational structure of Intelligence on the matter that emanates from Soul. The process of emanation is typically conceived to be necessary and timeless: although Soul, for instance, proceeds from Intelligence, the notion of procession is one of logical dependence rather than temporal sequence. The One remains unaffected and undiminished by emanation: Plotinus likens the One to the sun, which necessarily emits light from its naturally infinite abundance without suffering change or loss of its own substance. Although emanationism influenced some Jewish, Christian, and Islamic thinkers, it was incompatible with those theistic doctrines of divine activity that maintained that God’s creative choice and the world thus created were contingent, and that God can, if he chooses, interact directly with individual creatures. See also PLOTINU. W.E.M.