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Literary notes about Unavoidable (AI summary)

The term "unavoidable" has been deployed in literature as a marker of inevitability, often signifying outcomes or actions that, once set in motion, cannot be circumvented. Philosophers like Plato and Kant use it to underscore logical or existential necessities—in Plato’s dialogues [1, 2] or Kant’s aesthetic judgments [3, 4]—suggesting that some conclusions are built into the fabric of reason itself. In novels by authors such as Jane Austen [5, 6] and Dickens [7, 8], the word registers both a sense of resigned fate and practical necessity, whether referring to a meeting that must occur or a delay caused by unforeseen circumstances. At the same time, in social and political commentaries by figures like Keynes [9, 10] and Chesterton [11, 12, 13], "unavoidable" reflects the relentless momentum of historical forces and the inexorable nature of societal change. Even in the realm of scientific and logical treatises by Hume [14, 15, 16] and Freud [17], the term is employed to denote outcomes that, under given conditions, simply cannot be escaped—underscoring a pervasive literary theme of determinism across genres and eras.
  1. Is not this unavoidable?
    — from The Republic of Plato by Plato
  2. Is not this unavoidable?
    — from The Republic by Plato
  3. The latter has indeed unavoidable difficulties which do not beset the logical Judgement.
    — from Kant's Critique of Judgement by Immanuel Kant
  4. For one result at least is unavoidable.
    — from Kant's Prolegomena to Any Future Metaphysics by Immanuel Kant
  5. One meeting was unavoidable.
    — from Sense and Sensibility by Jane Austen
  6. " Colonel Brandon again repeated his sorrow at being the cause of disappointing the party; but at the same time declared it to be unavoidable.
    — from Sense and Sensibility by Jane Austen
  7. You see this is unavoidable?' 'Dear friend, I said so.' 'True.
    — from Our Mutual Friend by Charles Dickens
  8. ' 'It might come to be justifiable and unavoidable at last,' the Secretary gently hinted, with a slight stress on the word.
    — from Our Mutual Friend by Charles Dickens
  9. France in all essentials was just as much the victim of German ambition as was Belgium, and France's entry into the war was just as unavoidable.
    — from The Economic Consequences of the Peace by John Maynard Keynes
  10. Great privation and great risks to society have become unavoidable.
    — from The Economic Consequences of the Peace by John Maynard Keynes
  11. AUTHORITY THE UNAVOIDABLE
    — from What's Wrong with the World by G. K. Chesterton
  12. It is an organic crisis and transformation of the most mysterious sort; so that even if the result is unavoidable, it will still be unexpected.
    — from What's Wrong with the World by G. K. Chesterton
  13. THE TRUTH ABOUT EDUCATION V. AN EVIL CRY VI. AUTHORITY THE UNAVOIDABLE VII.
    — from What's Wrong with the World by G. K. Chesterton
  14. At first sight this may seem a necessary and unavoidable consequence.
    — from A Treatise of Human Nature by David Hume
  15. This account of love is not peculiar to my system, but is unavoidable on any hypothesis.
    — from A Treatise of Human Nature by David Hume
  16. This conclusion leads them into another, which they regard as perfectly unavoidable.
    — from A Treatise of Human Nature by David Hume
  17. A certain measure of minuteness of detail is unavoidable in any such account.
    — from A General Introduction to Psychoanalysis by Sigmund Freud

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