Eubulides of Miletus c. 400 BC – c. 330 BC
Eubulides of Miletus was a Greek philosopher of the Megarian school and a contemporary and vigorous critic of Aristotle. He was renowned in antiquity for the invention or refinement of a set of paradoxes that have shaped logic and the philosophy of language ever since, including the Liar, the Sorites or Heap, the Horns, the Bald Man, the Veiled Man, and the Hooded Man. Diogenes Laertius preserves a list of his celebrated puzzles and a tradition that he was the teacher of Demosthenes the orator. His paradoxes shaped Stoic logic, medieval insolubilia, and twentieth-century formal semantics.
Key facts
- Nationality
- Greek
- Era
- Ancient
- Movements
- Ancient Greek, Hellenistic
Selected quotes
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Attributed to Eubulides of Miletus:
“If a man says he is lying, does he speak truly or falsely?”
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Attributed to Eubulides of Miletus:
“When does a heap cease to be a heap if you take grains away one by one?”
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Attributed to Eubulides of Miletus:
“What you have not lost, you still have; you have not lost horns; therefore you have horns.”
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Attributed to Eubulides of Miletus:
“The bald man's first lost hair did not make him bald; one further hair cannot do so either.”
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Attributed to Eubulides of Miletus:
“Logic must guard against the seductions of ordinary speech.”