Hostname: page-component-78c5997874-8bhkd Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-11-14T22:21:27.346Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

Zeno's Arrow and the Significance of the Present

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  12 April 2010

Robin LePoidevin
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Extract

Perhaps the real paradox of Zeno's Arrow is that, although entirely stationary, it has, against all odds, successfully traversed over two millennia of human thought to trouble successive generations of philosophers. The prospects were not good: few original Zenonian fragments survive, and our access to the paradoxes has been for the most part through unsympathetic commentaries. Moreover, like its sister paradoxes of motion, the Arrow has repeatedly been dismissed as specious and easily dissolved. Even those commentators who have taken it seriously have propounded solutions with which they profess themselves to be perfectly satisfied. So my question is: will Zeno's Arrow survive into the millennium just begun?

Type
Papers
Information
Royal Institute of Philosophy Supplements , Volume 50 , March 2002 , pp. 57 - 72
Copyright
Copyright © The Royal Institute of Philosophy and the contributors 2002

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

Barnes, Jonathan 1982. The Presocratic Philosophers, revised edition, London: Routledge and Kegan Paul.Google Scholar
Butterfield, Jeremy 1998. ‘Determinism and Indeterminism’, in Craig, Edward (ed.) The Routledge Encyclopedia of Philosophy, London: Routledge, pp. 33–9.Google Scholar
Grünbaum, Adolf 1967. Modern Science and Zeno's Paradoxes, Connecticut: Wesleyan University Press.Google Scholar
Hegel, G. W. F. 1840. Lectures on the History of Philosophy, trans. Haldane, E. S., London: Kegan Paul.Google Scholar
Hussey, Edward 1983. Aristotle's Physics, Books III and IV, Oxford: Clarendon Press.Google Scholar
Kirk, G. S., Raven, J. E., and Schofield, M. 1983. The Presocratic Philosophers: A Critical History with a Selection of Texts, 2nd edition, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Lear, Jonathan 1981. ‘A Note on Zeno's Arrow’, Phronesis, 26, pp. 91–104CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Lear, Jonathan (1988) Aristotle: The Desire to Understand, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Lee, H. D. P. 1936. Zeno of Elea, Cambridge: Cambridge University PressGoogle Scholar
Le Poidevin, Robin 1991. Change, Cause and Contradiction, London: Macmillan.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Newton-Smith, W. H. 1980. The Structure of Time, London: Routledge and Kegan Paul.Google Scholar
Owen, G. E. L. 1957. ‘Zeno and the Mathematicians’, Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, 58, pp. 199–222; reprinted in Owen (1986), pp. 45-61.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Owen, G. E. L. 1976. ‘Aristotle on Time’, in Machamer, P. and Turnbull, R. (eds), Motion and Time, Space and Matter, Columbus: Ohio State University Press, pp. 3–27; reprinted in Owen (1986), pp. 295-314.Google Scholar
Owen, G. E. L. 1986. Logic, Science and Dialectic, ed. Nussbaum, Martha, London: Duckworth.Google Scholar
Priest, Graham 1987. In Contradiction: A Study of the Transconsistent, Dordrecht: Nijhoff.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Ross, W. D, 1936. Aristotle's Physics, Oxford Clarendon Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Russell, Bertrand 1903. The Principles of Mathematics, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Salmon, Wesley 1970. Zeno's Paradoxes, Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill.Google Scholar
Sorabji, Richard 1983. Time, Creation and the Continuum, London: Duckworth.Google Scholar
Vlastos, G. 1966. ‘A Note on Zeno's Arrow’, Phronesis, 11, pp. 3–18.CrossRefGoogle Scholar