ἀπορία

ἀπορία (aporia, "ah-por-EE-ah") lives, in this corpus, where thinking gets stuck. The record gives 370 occurrences spread across 63 works, and the works that hold the most of it are, in order, the Metaphysics (63), the Enneads (41), then a pair tied at thirty — a History (30) and the Politics (30) — followed by the Laws (24) and the Anabasis (12). The record names these works but not their authors, so I will keep to the titles it actually carries.

Only one lexicon entry attaches to the lemma here: LSJ (Liddell–Scott–Jones, 1940). It glosses the noun as "being ἄπορος" — the adjective aporos, "at a loss" — and lays out four senses: first the "difficulty of passing" said of places, its own first citation X. An. 5.6.10, then the "difficulty, straits, impossibility" of things, and, of persons, "being at a loss, embarrassment, perplexity." On where the word comes from, the record is silent past that adjective: the noun is built on ἄπορος, LSJ points no further back, and its etymology-claim list is empty — no reconstructed root to report, and none imported.

The fourth sense is the one that fits this distribution. In Dialectic, LSJ says, ἀπορία becomes a "question for discussion, difficulty, puzzle" — the knot a thinker raises precisely in order to work through it. LSJ draws that sense from works at the top of this very list, citing the Metaphysics and the Politics for it, so that the word's heaviest holdings and its most technical use fall together. LSJ files one Anabasis passage, 5.6.10, under that first sense — the "difficulty of passing" of a place — while the bare surface ἀπορία also stands at 1.3.13 and 3.1.11, though the record keeps nothing of those passages beyond the word.

If the word for a mind at a loss is a river with no crossing, what would it mean to find the ford?