From A(chilles) to Z(eno)…
Armed with the laws of logic and a few simple, plausible, and apparently harmless assumptions, philosophers can construct proofs of the most absurd conclusions. These proofs can give us pause; should we believe the unbelievable? This is the power of a paradox.
This website is a celebration of such proofs. The most interesting philosophical arguments are those that proceed from undeniable premises, via inescapable logic, to incredible conclusions. When philosophy proves what is plausible it is mundane; it is only when philosophy appears to prove what is incredible that things really get interesting.
This site explains many of the classic paradoxes, including Achilles and the Tortoise, The Paradox of the Heap, and The Liar Paradox, along with some less familiar paradoxes such as The Problem of the Specious Present.
I hope that you’ll leave the site perplexed and confused.
Indeed…
As we muse on the immutable, we might recall that it was on this date in 1793 that the first definition was established for the metre (aka, the meter): 1/10 000 000 of the northern quadrant of the Paris meridian (5 132 430 toises of Paris, from the north pole to the equator). The name was derived from the work of 17th Century Italian scientist Tito Livio Burattini, and his work Misura Universale, in which he used the words metro cattolico (derived from the Greek métron katholikón), “a universal measure.” It was formally adopted by the French National Assembly in 1795, and passed in English in 1797. (The current definition of a metre is the distance traveled by light in a complete vacuum in 1/299,792,458th of a second.)
