Buridan's Ass Resolved: How Asymmetric Survival Needs Dissolve Aristotle's Paradox and Why This Solution Is Systematically Dismissed

This paper presents a straightforward resolution to Aristotle's original indecision paradox based on asymmetric survival thresholds: humans succumb to dehydration within 3-7 days but can survive starvation for approximately three weeks, establishing water as the rational priority despite equal subjective discomfort. The philosophical paradox known as Buridan's Ass—depicting a donkey starving between two identical hay piles—dominates approximately 80% of contemporary academic discourse on rational indecision, overshadowing its historical predecessor from Aristotle (c. 350 BCE): a man, equally hungry and thirsty, paralyzed between food and drink. However, both this solution and the paradox it addresses face systematic dismissal within philosophical discourse. We demonstrate that cognitive biases—specifically confirmation bias, anchoring bias, and belief perseverance—amplified by the academic hegemony of six dominant nations (United States, United Kingdom, Germany, France, China, and Japan), have entrenched the artificially symmetric donkey scenario as canonical while marginalizing Aristotle's more realistic formulation and its empirically grounded resolution. Drawing on quantitative data from Google Scholar, Wikipedia analytics, Google Trends, and philosophical databases (accessed October 2025), we document how institutional structures actively suppress engagement with the original paradox, revealing systemic issues in how academic power determines which philosophical problems are deemed worthy of consideration. This study contributes to metaphilosophy, social epistemology, and the sociology of knowledge by exposing mechanisms through which historically accurate and empirically solvable philosophical problems are displaced by artificial constructions that resist resolution.