Zeno

Zeno, a Greek philosopher who flourished about 500 B.C. at Elea, a town of Lucania, in Italy. A favourite disciple of Parmenides, he came with him to Athens, and there the illustrious Pericles was one of his pupils. According to the account usually given, on his return to Elea he joined an unsuccessful conspiracy to deliver his native town from the tyrant Nearchus, and the severest tortures failed to make him betray his accomplices. To ensure his silence he is said even to have bit his tongue off and spat it in the tyrant's face. He held the usual doctrines of the Eleatic school respecting the unity and the immutability of all things, distrust in knowledge acquired through the senses, and reliance on pure reason. He did not deny that there were phenomena or appearances, but he maintained that these were not real existences, in anticipation of Bishop Berkeley. Of his famous four arguments against motion the best known is that of Achilles and the tortoise. But he is chiefly remarkable for having been the first to employ the style of argument known by the name of Dialectics, in which error is refuted, and truth sought to be established, by the reductio ad absurdum—a method so skilfully employed afterwards by Socrates and Plato. He devoted his great powers of argument to enforce the doctrines first broached by Xenophanes, and more systematically developed by Parmenides. His works were in prose, but only small fragments have been preserved. See Zeller's Pre-Socratic Philosophy (Eng. trans. 1881).