A paradox (or antinomy) is a statement that appears self-contradictory or contrary to common sense. Scholars believe that the philosopher Zeno wrote his paradoxes around 465 B.C. He probably wrote about forty paradoxes, but only about two hundred words actually written by Zeno have survived; and these mention only two paradoxes. Thus, almost all of the information we have about Zeno's paradoxes comes from other authors, notably Aristotle and Simplicius. In particular, Aristotle dealt with Zeno's paradoxes of motion in his book Physics; he considered Zeno the father of dialectics, the method of argumentative reasoning in which a stated thesis is argued against by an interlocutor who tries to disprove it by showing that it produces a contradiction.

The point of Zeno's paradoxes is to prove that the idea of continuous motion is self-contradictory: that is, he wanted to first confute the ideas of Eraclitus, who...