Buridan's ass
Language: English
Part of speech: name
Forms: form: Buridan's Ass
Etymology: After the fourteenth-century French philosopher Jean Buridan, whose philosophy of moral determinism it satirizes.
Senses: examples: text: Buridan is best-known to philosophers for the example of "Buridan's Ass," starving to death between two equidistant and equally tempting bales of hay, [...]
ref: 1985, Jean Buridan, Peter King, Jean Buridan's Logic, Springer, →ISBN, page 3:
text: They remain like Buridan's Ass, in a kind of frozen indecisiveness, between total freedom and total regulation.
ref: 2003 August 31, Tony Dermody <tdermody@iol.NODAMNJUNK.ie>, “Re: A Few Questions”, in alt.atheism.moderated (Usenet), message-ID <2lpcvpdh3zwc$.1mk81eq1qmfo3$.dlg@40tude.net>:
text: Did you refuse to choose between saving your son sentenced to death penalty and saving your son sentenced to slavery for life? Is that not an indication that you find no difference between them, and are frozen, as Buridan's ass, into an inability to choose between them, and have instead chosen to starve morally, rather than make such a choice?
ref: 2003 September 6, Euro <euro82@excite.com>, “PV's small arrangements with truth”, in alt.activism.death-penalty (Usenet), message-ID <4f3f4d56.0309061154.3fea3b3a@posting.google.com>:
text: The worst case for productivity is probably when two _perfectly equivalent_ ways exist. Buridan's ass notoriously starved to death in just such a worst-case situation; groups of programmers may not go quite as far, but are sure to waste lots of time & energy deciding.
ref: 2003 October 11, Alex Martelli <aleaxit@yahoo.com>, “Re: Python syntax in Lisp and Scheme”, in comp.lang.python, comp.lang.lisp, comp.lang.scheme (Usenet), message-ID <gGWhb.200390$hE5.6777507@news1.tin.it>:
glosses: The hypothetical donkey who is placed precisely midway between two sources of food or water.
The hypothetical donkey in the context of certainly dying of hunger or thirst by being unable to choose between the two equidistant options.
examples: text: Since either haystack is better than starvation, and since neither haystack is known to be worse than the other, Buridan's ass has a good reason to choose either. Suppose it chooses haystack A, rejecting haystack B as well as starvation.
ref: 1995, Ross Harrison, World, mind, and ethics: essays on the ethical philosophy of Bernard Williams, illustrated edition, Cambridge University Press, →ISBN, page 23:
text: This Narrator is like the famous or infamous Buridan's ass, protagonist of a problem or example that, in one form or another, can be found in philosophical discourse from Aristotle to Schpenhauer.
ref: 2000, Kathryn L. Lynch, Chaucer's philosophical visions, illustrated edition, Boydell & Brewer Ltd, →ISBN, page 90:
text: The ass's commitment to a seeming demand or rationality has damaged his health. Maybe we — and Buridan's ass — should often resist requiring a discriminating reason for rational action.
ref: 2009, Peter Cave, This sentence is false: an introduction to philosophical paradoxes, Continuum International Publishing Group, →ISBN, page 9:
glosses: The hypothetical donkey who is placed precisely midway between two sources of food or water.
The hypothetical donkey, as a typical character of a number of philosophical paradoxes involving equally valuable incentives to action, and the nature of the possible choices and outcomes.