Buridan believed a rational choice could not be made. Later writers satirised this view in terms of an ass which, confronted by both food and water, must necessarily die of both hunger and thirst while pondering a decision. Many later philosophers have addressed this problem of "choice without preference". In his Ethics (ca 1661), Baruch de Spinoza accepts that his determinist philosophy implies that such a state of indecision could happen, but that this should be classed with other irrational behavior: Pierre Bayle (1647-1706) in his Dictionnaire authored some of the most comprehensive discussions of the problem. He recognized explicitly that if humans have the ability to make a decision between choices with no reason for preference, this means that humans have free will, and bears on man's rationalization of God's choices. He regarded the previous examples of the ass or dates as artificial, and pointed out there are many real instances in everyday life in which a person must make a choice in which the choice doesn't matter to him, and that this presents no problem. Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz (1646-1716) believed, from his principle of sufficient reason, that if a person's preferences were really balanced no decision could be made, but that petites perceptions, small perceived preferences below the threshold of consciousness that are always present, explains why people are able to make such a choice. Discussion Some proponents of hard determinism such as Spinoza have granted the unpleasantness of the scenario, but have denied that it illustrates a true paradox, since one does not contradict oneself in suggesting that a man might die between two equally plausible routes of action. Other writers have opted to deny the validity of the illustration. A typical counter-argument is that rationality as described in the paradox is so limited as to be a straw man version of the real thing, which does allow the consideration of meta-arguments. In other words, it is entirely rational to recognize that both choices are equally good and arbitrarily (randomly) pick one instead of starving; although the decision that they are sufficiently the same is also subject to Buridan's ass. The idea that a random decision could be made is sometimes used as an attempted justification for faith or intuitivity (called by Aristotle noetic or noesis). The argument is that, like the starving ass, we must make a choice to avoid being frozen in endless doubt. Other