ABSTRACT
This paradox is usually taken as a challenge to rationality. But Spinoza (1632-77), who was the first to associate it with Buridan, construed it as a challenge to causal determinism. Suppose that there is nothing in the animal’s causal history to incline him to one table rather than the other. In that case, if all his actions are causally predetermined – the inevitable effects of prior causes, which themselves are produced by prior causes in a chain that goes back indefinitely – he will sit there and perish. If causal determinism is true of animals, we might expect it to apply to people as well. If everything that happens is determined by prior causes, a person would stay there and die. And it does seem possible in principle that he should find himself in such a position. If he did, wouldn’t he always find some way of choosing a table to go to first rather than let himself starve to death? ‘If I concede that he will [starve to death]’, said Spinoza, ‘I would seem to conceive an
ass, or a statue of a man, not a man. But if I deny that he will, then he will determine himself, and consequently have the faculty of going where he wills and doing what he wills.’
