The Donkey Who Starved Between Two Identical Bales Wasn't Buridan's
Jean Buridan never wrote about the donkey, the bales, or the choice — his critics put it in his mouth to mock him.
Set a hungry donkey halfway between two identical bales of hay. The donkey has no reason to prefer either bale. So, the puzzle goes, a perfectly rational donkey starves.
The scenario is named for Jean Buridan, a 14th-century French philosopher who taught at the University of Paris. He almost certainly did not invent it. No surviving work of Buridan's contains the donkey example. The closest he came was a footnote-style discussion of a dog facing two equally appealing pieces of food, in his commentary on Aristotle's De Caelo. Buridan's actual position was that, in such cases, the will should defer judgment until new information arrived. He was not endorsing the starvation conclusion.
The donkey appears later, in 14th- and 15th-century writers using it to ridicule Buridan's view. Reductio ad absurdum: if your theory of rational action implies the dog starves, your theory is wrong. The mockery stuck. By the 17th century the example was being attributed to Buridan as if he had advocated it.
The underlying puzzle is older than him. Aristotle in On the Heavens gives the case of a man equally hungry and thirsty, equidistant from food and drink, who must perish. The 11th-century Persian theologian Al-Ghazali used a near-identical scenario to argue against pure rationalism in The Incoherence of the Philosophers.
Baruch Spinoza, two and a half centuries after Buridan, conceded that a perfectly rational being in the donkey's position would die — and added that any human in such a position would deserve to be considered an ass. He did not name his target.
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