Zeno of Elea

Pre-Socratic

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Zeno was Parmenides' student and defender. When critics mocked the idea that change is impossible, Zeno answered not with theories but with puzzles. If Achilles gives a tortoise a head start, he can never catch it, because he must first reach where the tortoise was, by which time it has moved on. An arrow in flight is at rest at every instant, so it never moves. These paradoxes were not riddles. They were arguments designed to show that the critics' own assumptions about space, time, and motion led to absurdity.

Birth

c. 495 BCE·Elea

Born in Elea

Zeno was born around 495 BCE in Elea, a Greek colony on the Tyrrhenian coast of southern Italy. The city had been founded by exiles from Phocaea, and it retained something of the exile's stubbornness — a tendency to hold a position against pressure. Elea was also home to Parmenides, who would become Zeno's teacher and the fixed point of his entire intellectual life. He was, by ancient accounts, the most devoted student Parmenides ever had.

Words

“If everything that exists has a place, place too will have a place, and so on to infinity.”
— Zeno of Elea

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