Akademik

(b. c. 490 BC)

The pupil and principal defender of Parmenides, Zeno was called the inventor of dialectic by Aristotle . His one book, of which we possess only fragments, contained many arguments for the unreality of the pluralistic world that we take ourselves to inhabit. The most famous of these are the four arguments against motion, known as Zeno's paradoxes . But Zeno also proposed many other antinomies, showing that objects must be both limited and unlimited in number, like and unlike, one and many, infinitesimally small and infinitely large. Zeno's own attitude to these antinomies, as to his arguments against motion, has been disputed, but he is consistently described as a convinced Parmenidean.