Definition of "qua"

Qua work of art, the work of art cannot be interpreted; there is nothing to interpret; we can only criticize it according to standards, in comparison to other works of art; […]

1920, T. S. Eliot, “Hamlet and His Problems”, in The Sacred Wood

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.

1954: Gilbert Ryle, Dilemmas: The Tarner Lectures, 1953, dilemma vii: Perception, page 99 (The Syndics of the Cambridge University Press)

{1} 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. / {2} I am denying that a dream qua dream is a seeming, appearance or ‘semblance of reality’.

1962: Norman Malcolm; Dreaming; chapter nine: “Judgments in Sleep”, page 39{1}; chapter twelve: “The Concept of Dreaming”, page 68{2} (1977 paperback reprint; Routledge & Kegan Paul; ISBN 0‒7100‒3836‒4 (c), 0‒7100‒8434‒X (p))

It was qua poet that Byron resurrected the exploded and discarded immortal Christian soul by bodying it forth through the notion of soul conceived as poetic imagination.

2003, Roy Porter, Flesh in the Age of Reason, Penguin, published 2004, page 458

"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."

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.

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.

2009: Ken Levy, Killing, Letting Die, and the Case for Mildly Punishing Bad Samaritanism, Georgia Law Review, p. 24.

Sometimes, though, you pick up a novel and it makes your skin prickle — not necessarily because it’s a great novel qua novel, which you can’t know until the end, but because of the velocity of its microperceptions.

2022 March 29, Dwight Garner, “In Jennifer Egan’s New Novel, Our Memories Are Available for All to See”, in The New York Times‎

Crows have a language of their own in a wild state that any observant person can learn. […] Then he would straighten his head back and, with the most comical bowing and wagging, say: "Qua qua qua, qua qua qua" for perhaps a minute.

1909, The Country Gentleman, volume 74, page 266

Qua... qua... qua... out of the blue I hear the crows cawing with great fanfare as they announce to the world at large that they are here by my side and intend to probe into my being.

2012, Jaman Tree, I Crow River