Zeno of Elea

Zeno of Elea was the devoted pupil of Parmenides and the great defender of Eleatic philosophy. To uphold his master's claim that reality is one and changeless, he devised a battery of ingenious paradoxes designed to show that plurality and motion lead to absurdity.

Most famous are the paradoxes of motion: Achilles can never overtake the tortoise, and the flying arrow is, at every instant, at rest. Aristotle called Zeno the inventor of dialectic, for his method of deriving contradictions from an opponent's premises; his puzzles about the infinite and the continuous have occupied mathematicians and philosophers ever since.