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aristarchus [soylentnews.org] writes:

Quartz [qz.com]

And janrinok says he cannot access this site? What is wrong with him, has he been banned from all sites that have rational discussion of intellectual stuffs?

Almost 2,500 years ago, the philosopher Zeno of Elea set out to challenge the way we understand the physical world through a set of brain teasers that have stuck with us for millennia. The most powerful of Zeno’s paradoxes grapple with the concept of infinity while pitting observable reality against the scientific language we use to describe that reality, suggesting that elements of the everyday, like motion and speed, are actually illusory.

Over the thousands of years it took to finally wrap our brains around his most famous paradoxes, they revealed weaknesses in the tools we use to understand the basics of space and time. More than just riddles, they have pushed mathematicians and philosophers to be more rigorous and precise in the logic we use to describe the concepts at work in the paradoxical traps Zeno so cleverly set.

Calculus would finally explain the paradoxes, but even then it took hundreds of years to refine the math. The most recent major breakthrough in understanding the tension between the infinite and the finite, the core of Zeno’s paradoxes, is just a few decades old. And some people—philosophers, mostly—are still toying with the tricks the paradoxes play on our minds. Here’s a finite description of an infinitely frustrating set of questions.

Don't buy the calculus thing. Just stipulating an infinitessimal does nothing but change the conditions of the original paradox, a strawman fallacy,if you will. And it solves the problem? Who are you going to believe, logic, or your lying eyes?

Of course, the part of the Fine Original submission that probably put the lovely janrinok off his morning baguette was this:

490 BC: Zeno is born in Elea, in what is now southern Italy.

450 BC: Zeno and his mentor Parmenides (“the father of metaphysics”) visit Athens, where they meet Socrates.

435 BC: Zeno dies, reportedly stabbed to death while biting the ear of the Elean tyrant he tried to overthrow.

To which I, as a philosopher, had to point out, that it has ever been the duty of philosophy and philosophers to oppose tyranny. Pythagoras, before my time, left our native Samos because of the tyrant Πολυκράτης, and Socrates died rather than submit to the tyranny of the masses, and even Seneca choose death over fealty. (Good luck, US Intelligence Community!). So it is good to punch Nazis, and other authoritarians, in the face, and even bite their ear, or kick them very hard in the gonads, which, by the way, is a Greek word, γονάδα, which means "gonads".

Original Submission