Zeno philosopher biography
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Scientist of the Day - Zeno of Elea
Supposed portrait of Zeno of Elea, engraving from Diogenes Laërtius, Lives and Opinions of Eminent Philosophers, unspecified edition, 17th century (Wikimedia commons)
Zeno of Elea, a pre-Socratic Greek philosopher, flourished about 450 B.C.E; we estimate he was born around 490 B.C.E. and died around 420. Elea was a Greek colony in southern Italy, on the west coast, below modern Naples, not too far from where the Pythagoreans had set up their own colony, in Croton. Elea emerged on the map of pre-Socratic philosophy when Parmenides of Elea, around 475, wrote a book with the title: On Nature. In it, Parmenides argued that change is an illusion; that there is only one thing in the world, Being, and Being, logically, cannot change. That created quite a problem for natural philosophers, such as Heraclitus of Ephesus, who focused their attention on the nature of change. We wrote a post on Parmenides several months ago, and one on Heraclitus before that.
Zeno was a junior disciple of Parmenides, part of what is called the Eleatic School, and he took it upon himself to provide further evidence for the illusory nature of change, by proposing a series of paradoxes, now known as Zeno's Paradoxes. There seem to have been nine of
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INTRODUCTION
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Quick Info
Elea, Lucania (now southern Italy)
Elea, Lucania (now southern Italy)
Biography
Very little is known of the life of Zeno of Elea. We certainly know that he was a philosopher, and he is said to have been the son of Teleutagoras. The main source of our knowledge of Zeno comes from the dialogue Parmenides written by Plato.Zeno was a pupil and friend of the philosopher Parmenides and studied with him in Elea. The Eleatic School, one of the leading pre-Socratic schools of Greek philosophy, had been founded by Parmenides in Elea in southern Italy. His philosophy of monism claimed that the many things which appear to exist are merely a single eternal reality which he called Being. His principle was that "all is one" and that change or non-Being are impossible. Certainly Zeno was greatly influenced by the arguments of Parmenides and Plato tells us that the two philosophers visited Athens together in around 450 BC.
Despite Plato's description of the visit of Zeno and Parmenides to Athens, it is far from universally accepted that the visit did indee