Zeno of Elea (jan 1, 490 BC – jan 1, 430 BC)

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Zeno of Elea, born around 490 BC in southern Italy, was a pre-Socratic philosopher known for his perplexing paradoxes.

A student of Parmenides, another significant pre-Socratic philosopher, Zeno is most famous for his arguments against the concept of motion, which have puzzled and intrigued philosophers and mathematicians for over two millennia.

Zeno's paradoxes are a set of philosophical problems generally understood to be centered around the notions of motion and plurality.

The most famous of these is perhaps the paradox of Achilles and the Tortoise, in which Achilles, the great Greek hero of the Trojan War, gives a tortoise a head start in a race.

Zeno argues that Achilles will never overtake the tortoise because, for each distance Achilles covers, the tortoise also advances, creating an infinite number of smaller distances that Achilles must cover, and thus he can never surpass the tortoise.

These paradoxes were designed to support Parmenides's philosophical argument that contradicts the evidence of our senses, asserting that the belief in plurality and change is mistaken, and in particular that motion is nothing but an illusion.

While Zeno's paradoxes have been resolved with the development of calculus and more sophisticated concepts of infinity and limits in mathematics, they continue to stimulate philosophical discussion and have had a significant impact on the philosophy of space and time.

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