Philosophy
c. 490 to 430 BC, Elea
Defender of Parmenides: paradoxes that motion and plurality are impossible.
Start learning Zeno →Zeno of Elea wrote his famous paradoxes not for their own sake but to defend his master Parmenides, who held that reality is a single, changeless One and that plurality and motion are illusions. Zeno’s strategy was to s…
Zeno’s most famous paradox: give a tortoise a head start, and swift-footed Achilles can never overtake it - for whenever he reaches where it was, it has crawled a little further, and this repeats without end. The parado…
At any single instant, a flying arrow occupies a space exactly equal to itself - and so, at that instant, it is at rest. But time is made of instants, and if the arrow is at rest at every instant, it is at rest througho…
Beneath the famous paradoxes of motion lie Zeno’s arguments against plurality - against the belief that there are many things at all. If reality is divided into many, he argued, each thing must be both infinitely large…
Zeno failed to prove the changeless One, but he succeeded beyond measure in everything else. Aristotle called him the inventor of dialectic; his paradoxes drove the development of the mathematics of the infinite, from A…
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