Concept
Aporia
Overview
In philosophy, an aporia (Ancient Greek: ᾰ̓πορῐ́ᾱ, romanized: aporíā, lit. '"lacking passage", also: "impasse", "difficulty in passage", "puzzlement"') is a conundrum or state of puzzlement. In rhetoric, it is a declaration of doubt, made for rhetorical purpose and often feigned. The notion of an aporia is principally found in ancient Greek philosophy, but it also plays a role in modern post-structuralist philosophy, as in the writings of Jacques Derrida and Luce Irigaray, and it has also served as an instrument of investigation in analytic philosophy.
Overview adapted from Wikipedia (CC BY-SA 4.0; see the article history for authors).
Possible passages
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In the proposition, "Wine is good," it is understood with equal readiness, though for somewhat different reasons, that the assertion is not intended to be universal, but particular.[16]
John Stuart Mill, A System of Logic
States what Aporia is.
But if, in addition to the fundamental cognition, a second judgement is necessary for the production of the conclusion, it is called a conclusion of the reason. In the proposition: All men are mortal, are contained the propositions: Some men are mortal, Nothing that is not mortal is a man, and these are therefore immediate conclusions from the first.
Immanuel Kant, The Critique of Pure Reason
States what Aporia is.
Commonsense theories left the gap untouched, declaring our mind able to clear it by a self-transcending leap. Transcendentalist theories left it impossible to traverse by finite knowers, and brought an absolute in to perform the saltatory act. All the while, in the very bosom of the finite experience, every conjunction required to make the relation intelligible is given in full. Either the knower and the known are…
William James, The Meaning of Truth
Close in meaning to Aporia; the term itself is not named.
Philosophers who discussed Aporia
Related ideas
- Empiricism
- Pyrrhonism
- Philosophy
- Analytic philosophy
- Ancient Greek philosophy
- Metaphysics
- Plato
- Paradox
- Ataraxia
- Rhetoric
- Socrates
- Metaphysics (Aristotle)
- Doubt
- Aristotle
- Tabula rasa
- Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy
- Syllogism
- Jacques Derrida
- Nicholas Rescher
- Meno
- Luce Irigaray
- Rationalism
- A priori and a posteriori
- Interlocutor (linguistics)
Opposing perspectives
Place in the tradition
Part of Ancient Greek philosophy.