Philosophy & ThoughtGreek → English
Aporia
/əˈpɔːriə/noun
A state of genuine philosophical impasse, where an argument has closed off every available answer.
The Greek roots
ἀ-
a-
not, without
πόρος
póros
passage, ford
Literally: “no way through”
The story of the word
πόρος is the crossing point of a river, so ἀπορία is the traveller's problem of standing at the bank with no ford in sight. Most of Plato's early dialogues end in it, and in the Meno the victim complains that Socrates has numbed him like a torpedo ray. Rhetoric later took the word for a milder thing, the speaker's show of not knowing where to begin, and literary theory took it again in the twentieth century for a text that undoes itself.
- How it travelled
- Ancient Greek → Latin → English
- First recorded
- 16th century
Same family
poreporousemporium
In a sentence
The seminar ended in aporia, which the tutor insisted was the correct result.