Zeno of Elea
c. 490 – c. 430 BCE · Elea, southern Italy
The inventor of the paradoxes of motion, which used ordinary assumptions about space and time to prove that nothing can move.
Key ideas
Zeno was a student and defender of Parmenides. His method was to take his opponents' assumptions, that there are many things and that they move, and show that these lead to absurd conclusions. The most famous results are the four paradoxes of motion: the Dichotomy, Achilles and the tortoise, the Arrow and the Stadium, all discussed in Zeno's paradoxes.
Aristotle credited him with inventing dialectic, arguing from an opponent's premises to a contradiction. The paradoxes forced later thinkers to think precisely about infinite series, continuity and the nature of time, and the debate over whether modern mathematics fully dissolves them is still alive.
Life, briefly
Little is known about his life. Plato describes him as about forty when he visited Athens with Parmenides. Later sources report that he was tortured and killed after plotting against a tyrant, refusing to betray his fellow conspirators, though the details vary widely between versions.
Major works
- A book of arguments, now lost; the paradoxes survive mainly through Aristotle's Physics and later commentators
Appears in
Further reading
- EncyclopediaStanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy: Zeno of Elea
- WikipediaZeno of Elea