Buridan's Ass
A donkey stands exactly halfway between two identical bales of hay. With no reason on earth to prefer either, does it starve?
c. 1340 (the attribution; the example is far older)14 min read
Fourteenth-century Parisian nominalism
John Buridan
1300 – 1361
Jean Buridan was a secular master of arts at the University of Paris, twice its rector, and the most influential logician of his century. He held that the will can defer choice when the intellect finds no decisive reason either way. The starving donkey attached to his name appears nowhere in his surviving writings; it is a caricature aimed at that doctrine by later critics. His birth and death dates are both approximate.