Zeno of Elea 490 BC – 430 BC
Zeno of Elea was a Greek philosopher and a pupil of Parmenides. He defended his teacher's claim that reality is one and unchanging by constructing a series of paradoxes intended to show that motion, plurality, and divisibility lead to contradiction. The most famous of these are the paradoxes of Achilles and the tortoise, the dichotomy, the arrow, and the stadium. Aristotle called Zeno the inventor of dialectic, and his arguments have driven inquiries into infinity, continuity, and the foundations of mathematics down to the modern era.
Key facts
- Nationality
- Greek
- Era
- Ancient
- Movements
- Pre-Socratic, Ancient Greek
Selected quotes
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Attributed to Zeno of Elea:
“What is in motion moves neither in the place in which it is, nor in one in which it is not.”
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Attributed to Zeno of Elea:
“If everything that exists has a place, place too will have a place, and so on ad infinitum.”
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Attributed to Zeno of Elea:
“That which, being added to another, does not make it greater, and being taken away from another does not make it less, is nothing.”
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Attributed to Zeno of Elea:
“If there are many things, they are both small and great: so small as to have no magnitude, so great as to be infinite.”
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Attributed to Zeno of Elea:
“The flying arrow is at rest.”