The Collaborative International Dictionary
Hierarchy \Hi"er*arch`y\ (h[imac]"[~e]r*[aum]rk`[y^]), n.; pl. Hierarchies (h[imac]"[~e]r*[aum]rk`[i^]z). [Gr. 'ierarchi`a: cf. F. hi['e]rarchie.]
Dominion or authority in sacred things.
A body of officials disposed organically in ranks and orders each subordinate to the one above it; a body of ecclesiastical rulers.
A form of government administered in the church by patriarchs, metropolitans, archbishops, bishops, and, in an inferior degree, by priests.
--Shipley.-
A rank or order of holy beings.
Standards and gonfalons . . . for distinction serve Of hierarchies, of orders, and degrees.
--Milton. -
(Math., Logic, Computers) Any group of objects ranked so that every one but the topmost is subordinate to a specified one above it; also, the entire set of ordering relations between such objects. The ordering relation between each object and the one above is called a hierarchical relation.
Note: Classification schemes, as in biology, usually form hierarchies.
Wiktionary
n. (plural of hierarchy English)
Usage examples of "hierarchies".
When we are ill there is a failure of coordination at one or more levels in these hierarchies, and the clarification of the relation of body to mind and psychosomatic illness requires a hierarchical approach.
With rationality, these dominator hierarchies are deconstructed because they are not based on worldcentric or postconventional standards, and rationality is not happy short of that omega point.
The real world does indeed contain some natural or normal hierarchies (as we'll see), and it definitely contains some pathological or dominator hierarchies.
This is also why normal hierarchies are often drawn as a series of concentric circles or spheres or "nests within nests.
By contrast, human hierarchies based on force or the threat of force not only inhibit personal creativity but also result in social systems in which the lowest (basest) human qualities are reinforced and humanity's higher aspirations (traits such as compassion and empathy as well as the striving for truth and justice) are systematically suppressed.
That is, the rise of certain value judgments that deny they are value judgments, the rise of certain hierarchies that deny the existence of hierarchies.
Perhaps it is, as I suggested earlier, that they are in such reaction to pathological hierarchies that they toss the baby out with the bathwater.
The great world religions arose within a worldview of mythic and mythic-rational, and upon a techno-economic base of horse and plow (herding/agrarian)with scarce resource of membership and thus with corresponding (and very rigid) hierarchies of power, membership, wealth, and access to the Divine.
With the emergence of conop, hierarchies are indeed creatednot only mentally, but socially, politically, and religiouslya mania for caste systems and dominator hierarchies spring up wherever magic gives way to myth.
The same Reason that allowed the deconstruction of the dominator hierarchies inherent in the mythic structure could also, with the same tools, collapse the Kosmos in favor of the cosmos.
Even though the affirmation of this particular ethic itself steps outside the interlocking order: this ethic devalues other ethicsthat is, it is a hierarchy of value that denies hierarchies of value, as we saw in chapter 1.
On the other hand, there was that nastiness of the dominator hierarchies of King and Pope and hypermasculine God: perhaps, after all, 'tis not the Paradise sought.
Actual hierarchies of any sort are denied in the name of a diversitarian stance that explicitly denies that which its own stance implicitly presupposes.
Or maybe it was just nice to get away from all the usual male hierarchies in academia.
He was a great deal smarter concerning problems about the others of his kind—where they were, their potential for threat or support, the hierarchies they formed—than about anything else in his environment.