0 a situation in which progress is impossible, especially because the people involved cannot agree:
The dispute had reached an impasse, as neither side would compromise.
1 a point in a process at which further progress is blocked, esp. by disagreement:
We have reached an impasse in the negotiations -- neither side will budge.
2 a situation in which further development is impossible:
be at/remain at an impasse With negotiations at an impasse, analysts warn the uncertainty may harm supermarket stocks.
For students of multiculturalism, the move has offered a way out of an ideological impasse.
The track leads, he might think, into a moral impasse in theory and into either anarchy or, worse, tyranny in practice.
In certain ways, this paper is about personal and institutional patronage: the working out of a difficult theoretical impasse requires individual and collective moral support.
At the point that seemed at first to be a moral impasse, the way for moral intellectual practice is in fact wide open.
Here contemporary science is pretty much at an impasse.
This leads to an impasse in which neither player can act rationally.
Ways to overcome such an impasse are examined, and eventually the solution is obtained.
Recent work in industrial policy and political theory takes seriously the historical impasse we now face.
