Another Look at Some of Zeno's Paradoxes

Extract

When I was first introduced to Zeno's paradoxes I thought how wonderful it is that the philosophers can prove things that are obviously not the case. The paradoxes of Zeno are particularly engaging for they, unlike such paradoxes as the set theoretic paradoxes of Russell and Löwenheim and Skolem, are straightforward and untechnical arguments about straightforward and untechnical concepts. Unquestionably, the most elegant refutation of any ‘proof’ that there is no motion was that of Diogenes of Sinope who, as Diogenes Laertius relates, simply walked about. Ingenious and incontestable as Diogenes’ response was, it does little to quell our intellectual uneasiness that something is gravely amiss about logic - it should not be possible to prove absurdities. I believe that logic is, for the present anyway, secure: that Zeno's paradoxes are in fact pseudo-paradoxical confusions.