Zeno's Paradoxes - Writings About Zeno’s Paradoxes

Writings About Zeno’s Paradoxes

Zeno’s paradoxes have inspired many writers

• Leo Tolstoy in War and Peace (Part 11, Chapter I) discusses the race of Achilles and the tortoise when critiquing "historical science".
• In the dialogue "What the Tortoise Said to Achilles", Lewis Carroll describes what happens at the end of the race. The tortoise discusses with Achilles a simple deductive argument. Achilles fails in demonstrating the argument because the tortoise leads him into an infinite regression.
• In Gödel, Escher, Bach by Douglas Hofstadter, the various chapters are separated by dialogues between Achilles and the tortoise, inspired by Lewis Carroll’s works.
• The Argentinian writer Jorge Luis Borges discusses Zeno’s paradoxes many times in his work, showing their relationship with infinity. Borges also used Zeno’s paradoxes as a metaphor for some situations described by Kafka. Borges traces, in an essay entitled "Avatars of the Tortoise", the many recurrences of this paradox in works of philosophy. The successive references he traces are Agrippa the Skeptic, Thomas Aquinas, Hermann Lotze, F.H. Bradley and William James.
• In Tom Stoppard's play Jumpers, the philosopher George Moore attempts a practical disproof with bow and arrow of the Dichotomy Paradox, with disastrous consequences for the hare and the tortoise.
• Harry Mulisch's philosophical magnum opus, De compositie van de wereld (Amsterdam, 1980) is based on Zeno's Paradoxes mostly. Along with Herakleitos' thoughts and Cusanus' coincidentia oppositorum they constitute the foundation for his own system of the 'octave'.
• In the novel Small Gods by Terry Pratchett the prophet Brutha encounters several Ephebian (Greek) philosophers in the country, attempting to disprove Zeno's paradox by shooting arrows at a succession of tortoises. So far, this has resulted only in a succession of "tortoise-kabobs."
• The Firesign Theatre's 1969 album How Can You Be in Two Places at Once When You're Not Anywhere at All contains a section originally titled "The Policemen's Brawl" but retitled "Zeno's Evil" when released on CD. In this segment, as the lead character is driving along in his new car, a series of audible highway signs reports that the distance to the Antelope Freeway is 1 mile, then 1⁄₂ mile, then 1⁄₄ mile, 1⁄₈ mile, and so on. The signs' monolog is interrupted just after reaching the 1⁄₅₁₂ mile mark.