The term absurdity has been used throughout history regarding foolishness and extremely poor reasoning to form beliefs.
[4] In Aristophanes' 5th century BC comedy The Wasps, his protagonist Philocleon learned the "absurdities" of Aesop's Fables, considered to be unreasonable fantasy and not real.
According to Martinich, Gilbert Ryle discussed the types of problem Hobbes refers to as absurdities under the term "category error".
[15][16][17] G. E. Moore, an English analytic philosopher, cited as a paradox of language such superficially absurd statements as, "I went to the pictures last Tuesday but I don't believe it".
[19][20] Therefore, absurdism, a philosophy most famously associated (posthumously) with Albert Camus, is the belief that the universe is irrational and meaningless, alongside theorizing about the human struggle to create meaning.
Seeking to accumulate excessive wealth or pursuing other existential goals in the face of certain death are other concepts discussed by philosophers who contemplate the absurd.
Following the Second World War, the Theatre of the Absurd was a notable absurdist fiction movement in the dramatic arts, depicting characters grappling with the meaninglessness of life.
The statement "Credo quia absurdum" ("I believe because it is absurd") is attributed to Tertullian from De Carne Christi, as translated by philosopher Voltaire.
[24] According to the New Advent Church, what Tertullian said in DCC 5 was "[...] the Son of God died; it is by all means to be believed, because it is absurd.
[citation needed] Absurdity can refer to any strict religious dogma that pushes something to the point of violating common sense.
For example, inflexible religious dictates are sometimes termed pharisaism, referring to unreasonable emphasis on observing exact words or rules, rather than the intent or spirit.
One example is Lewis Carroll's "Jabberwocky", a poem of nonsense verse, originally featured as a part of his absurdist novel Through the Looking-Glass, and What Alice Found There (1872).
[32] Argentine novelist Jorge Luis Borges used absurdities in his short stories to make points.
An example would be a statute that mistakenly provided for a winning rather than losing party to pay the other side's reasonable attorney's fees.
[35]: 235–237 In order to stay within the remit of textualism and not reach further into purposivism, the doctrine is restricted by two limiting principles: "...the absurdity and the injustice of applying the provision to the case would be so monstrous, that all mankind would, without hesitation, unite in rejecting the application"[36] and the absurdity must be correctable "...by modifying the text in relatively simple ways".
[42] It represents the concept of falsum, an elementary logical proposition, denoted by a constant "false" in several programming languages.