The Labours of Zeno - a supertask indeed?
Abstract
It is usually supposed that, with his dichotomy paradox, Zeno gave birth to the modern so-called supertask debate – the debate of whether carrying out an infinite sequence of actions or operations in a finite interval of time is physically or even logically possible. I argue that in fact this is not a problem raised by Zeno's dichotomy paradox, and that an account of the dichotomy paradox as a supertask (often implicitly offered also by scholars of ancient philosophy) seriously misconstrues the problems Zeno raises therein. However, comparing Zeno's paradox with a paradigmatic supertask can nevertheless be instructive, since it forces us to make explicit the pre-conditions on which the supertask debate rests and to examine whether these conditions do indeed obtain in the case of a continuous run. I will suggest in the end that the requirements for supertasks and for continuous finite runs are genuinely different.
Citation
Sattler , B M 2019 , ' The Labours of Zeno - a supertask indeed? ' , Ancient Philosophy Today: DIALOGOI , vol. 1 , no. 1 , pp. 1-17 . https://doi.org/10.3366/anph.2019.0002
Publication
Ancient Philosophy Today: DIALOGOI
Status
Peer reviewed
ISSN
2516-1164Type
Journal article
Rights
© 2019, Edinburgh University Press. This work has been made available online in accordance with the publisher's policies. This is the author created accepted version manuscript following peer review and as such may differ slightly from the final published version. The final published version of this work is available at https://doi.org/10.3366/anph.2019.0002
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