Averroes's Search

Originally included in the second anthology of Jorge Luis Borges short stories, El Aleph, published in 1949, "Averroës's Search" imagines the difficulty of the famed Arabic commentator and translator of Aristotle, Averroës, in explaining the concepts of tragedy and comedy. Averroës's difficulty lies in the fact that these concepts could not be expressed in Arabic; no appropriate words existed in Averroës's culture.

The paleontologist and essayist Stephen Jay Gould has commented on this Borges story, citing it as an example of Francis Bacon's idola fori or idol of the marketplace, noting that Borges was familiar with and admired Bacon's works.