Zeno of Elea (489–424 BCE)
Born 489 BCE, died 424 BCE.
Zeno of Elea (; Ancient Greek: Ζήνων ὁ Ἐλεάτης; c. 490 – c. 430 BC) was a pre-Socratic Greek philosopher from Elea, in what is now Southern Italy (Magna Graecia). He was a student of Parmenides and one of the Eleatics. Zeno defended his instructor's belief in monism, the idea that only one single entity exists that makes up all of reality. He rejected the existence of space, time, and motion. To disprove these concepts, he developed a series of paradoxes to demonstrate why they are impossible. Though his original writings are lost, subsequent descriptions by Plato, Aristotle, Diogenes Laertius, and Simplicius of Cilicia have allowed study of his ideas. Zeno's arguments are divided into two different types: his arguments against plurality, or the existence of multiple objects, and his arguments against motion. Those against plurality suggest that for anything to exist, it must be divisible infinitely, meaning it would necessarily have both infinite mass and no mass simultaneously.
Text from the Wikipedia article Zeno_of_Elea, licensed CC BY-SA 4.0.