Chapter 11 Can Achilles catch up with the tortoise?

After about 10 Olympia games, a famous philosopher Zeno (Zeno of Elea) appeared in Elea.It is said that he is handsome and eloquent.He was a student of Parmenides, loved by his teacher, and it is said that he became the adopted son of his teacher.In order to repay the teacher's kindness, the main philosophical activity of his life was to prove Parmenides' view that "beings do not move". His argument proceeds from the opposite side.He specifically demonstrated that motion is impossible in both time and space, thus proving that beings are immobile.He put forward four very famous arguments, namely "Achilles can't catch up with the tortoise", "dichotomy", "flying arrow does not move" and "half the time is equal to double the time", among which the first one is the most Famous.His arguments often confuse self-righteous philosophers.Aristotle called him "the founder of dialectics".

Achilles is the best runner in Homer's epic.But Zeno believed that Achilles would never catch up with the tortoise. Briefly his argument goes like this.To catch up with the tortoise, Achilles must first reach the original starting point of the tortoise.But it takes a certain amount of time for him to run to the starting point of the tortoise, so when he runs to the starting point of the tortoise, the tortoise has already moved forward for a certain distance, so he must spend a certain amount of time to rush to the new point where the tortoise is.And when he arrived at the new point where the tortoise was, the tortoise had already moved forward for a while.So if this goes on, Achilles will never catch up with the tortoise.

Although this assertion seems to be inconsistent with reality, his argument seems to be reasonable.So many thinkers later wanted to solve this problem. In addition, Zeno was a man of noble character and political conscience.Like Heraclitus, he despised the rich and powerful, and like Solon, he opposed tyrants and dictatorships.It is said that he was arrested for conspiring to overthrow the despotic tyrant, and when the tyrant asked him to confess his accomplices, he said that all the tyrant's friends were his accomplices, which foreshadowed that the tyrant had deserted all his relatives.The tyrant further asked who was his accomplice, and he said, "Also, my accomplice is yourself!" The tyrant's ear bit off a chunk.Then he said to the tyrant's attendants: "You cowards, after seeing me do this, you will continue to be the tyrant's slaves!" One version of his death is that the citizens rose up at his instigation, using The stone beat the tyrant to death and rescued him; and another version says that Zeno was thrown into a stone mortar by the tyrant and crushed to death with a pestle.He was probably only in his 60s when he died.In history, there was another philosopher named Zeno, Zeno of Cyprus, who was the founder of Stoicism.