英语词汇buridan-s ass的起源、历史背景-英语词源词典

Buridan’s ass. Buridan’s ass is “a hypothetical beast that stands exactly between two haystacks in every respect equal and starves to death because there is no reason why it should eat from one rather than the other.” The argument is a sophism, false because it ignores the fact that random choice remains when choice based on knowledge is impossible. Aristotle knew that the argument was specious when he drew the analogy in his De Caelo (“On the Heavens”), where he used it to criticize a theory of an earlier writer. However, the French scholastic phi- losopher Jean Buridan (ca. 1295–1356) accepted it as a philo- sophical principle when he wrote a commentary on Aristotle’s work. Buridan used a dog dying of hunger between two equally tempting dishes of food to illustrate the will’s paralysis when confronted with two equal choices and his philosophical soph- ism should really be called Buridan’s dog. How Buridan’s dog became Buridan’s ass remains something of a mystery. Aristotle used a man standing between food and drink in his analogy, so there is no help there. What probably happened was that Buri- dan’s opponents substituted the ass, long a symbol of stupidity, for the dog in Buridan’s analogy in order to deride his doctrine. Other myths about the rector of the University of Paris, as false as Buridan’s ass, insist that he founded Vienna University and was the lover of Joan of Navarre and/or Margaret of Burgundy, both queens of France.

词汇	buridan-s ass
词源	Buridan’s ass. Buridan’s ass is “a hypothetical beast that stands exactly between two haystacks in every respect equal and starves to death because there is no reason why it should eat from one rather than the other.” The argument is a sophism, false because it ignores the fact that random choice remains when choice based on knowledge is impossible. Aristotle knew that the argument was specious when he drew the analogy in his De Caelo (“On the Heavens”), where he used it to criticize a theory of an earlier writer. However, the French scholastic phi- losopher Jean Buridan (ca. 1295–1356) accepted it as a philo- sophical principle when he wrote a commentary on Aristotle’s work. Buridan used a dog dying of hunger between two equally tempting dishes of food to illustrate the will’s paralysis when confronted with two equal choices and his philosophical soph- ism should really be called Buridan’s dog. How Buridan’s dog became Buridan’s ass remains something of a mystery. Aristotle used a man standing between food and drink in his analogy, so there is no help there. What probably happened was that Buri- dan’s opponents substituted the ass, long a symbol of stupidity, for the dog in Buridan’s analogy in order to deride his doctrine. Other myths about the rector of the University of Paris, as false as Buridan’s ass, insist that he founded Vienna University and was the lover of Joan of Navarre and/or Margaret of Burgundy, both queens of France.
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