The Seba library treats Aporia in 8 passages, across 6 authors (including Lacan, Jacques, Ricoeur, Paul, Derrida, Jacques).
the poor Penia, by definition, by structure has properly speaking nothing to give, except her constitutive lack, aporia.
Lacan reads Penia’s aporia as a structural condition of constitutive lack, equating it with the formula ‘to give what one does not have’ and grounding the entire Platonic economy of desire in this productive insufficiency.
, The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, Book VIII: Transference, 2015thesis
No accommodation for the aporia as an aporia should transform lucid reflection into self-consenting paralysis. The phenomenon of ascription constitutes, in the final analysis, only a partial and as yet abstract determination of what is meant by the ipseity (the selfhood) of the self.
Ricoeur argues that aporetics must be inhabited rather than dissolved, treating each aporia of ascription as an impetus toward richer, more concrete determinations of selfhood.
, Oneself as Another, 1992thesis
the first aporetic phase of Physics IV informs or preforms the first figure of time in Hegel’s Philosophy of Nature. By the same token this aporia prefigures the relations between spirit and time.
Derrida demonstrates that Aristotle’s originary aporia concerning time and the ‘now’ structurally pre-forms Hegel’s entire speculative philosophy of nature and spirit, implicating all subsequent metaphysics of presence.
, Margins of Philosophy, 1982thesis
Aristotle only develops the aporia in its own terms, that is, in the concepts whose configuration is reconstituted by Heidegger… The traditional form of the question is never fundamentally put back into question.
Derrida argues that Aristotle’s treatment of time’s aporia, far from resolving it, merely elaborates it within a conceptual framework that remains unquestioned even by Heidegger’s reconstruction.
, Margins of Philosophy, 1982thesis
The third ‘place’ of virtual aporia, in relation to the eminent place conferred upon autonomy in the ‘Analytic,’ is to be sought in the opening essay on radical evil in Religion within the Limits of Reason Alone.
Ricoeur maps a third site of aporia within Kantian moral philosophy, locating the breakdown of autonomy’s self-sufficiency in the doctrine of radical evil and its disruption of the teleological-deontological relation.
, Oneself as Another, 1992supporting
at this point of aporia, the interlocutor confronts perhaps for the first time the limitations of their own claims to knowledge. It is a possible moment of conversion, or the transformation of one’s beliefs.
Sharpe frames Socratic aporia as a hinge moment — a potential conversion point at which the interlocutor, stripped of false certainty, may either resist or undergo genuine transformation.
, Philosophy as a Way of Life: History, Dimensions, Directions, 2021supporting
Many of the conceptual ambiguities concerning body image and body schema revolve, in part, around the question of whether and to what extent an image or schema involves consciousness. This seems to be an underlying aporia.
Gallagher identifies an irreducible aporia at the foundation of body-image research — the unresolved question of whether bodily schemata are conscious or pre-conscious — which generates the field’s central conceptual instabilities.
, How the Body Shapes the Mind, 2005supporting
Why would it be so awful to live with oneself as an imagined accomplice of evil if I believed that thinking about evil always landed me in an aporia, if I believed that I did not know what evil is?
Hannah invokes aporia in the context of moral self-knowledge, arguing that chronic aporetic uncertainty about the nature of evil undermines the psychological ground necessary for ethical self-relation.
, Encounters with the Soul: Active Imagination as Developed by C. G. Jung, 1981aside