Zeno's Arrow and the Significance of the Present

Summary

Introduction

Perhaps the real paradox of Zeno's Arrow is that, although entirely stationary, it has, against all odds, successfully traversed over two millennia of human thought to trouble successive generations of philosophers. The prospects were not good: few original Zenonian fragments survive, and our access to the paradoxes has been for the most part through unsympathetic commentaries. Moreover, like its sister paradoxes of motion, the Arrow has repeatedly been dismissed as specious and easily dissolved. Even those commentators who have taken it seriously have propounded solutions with which they profess themselves to be perfectly satisfied. So my question is: will Zeno's Arrow survive into the millennium just begun?

I certainly hope so. What I want to do in this paper is argue, not simply for its preservation, but also for its creative reconstruction. Every generation needs to reinvent the wheel. Arguments, conundrums, paradoxes have to be rediscovered and re-presented in the contemporary idiom. Philosophy of time has of course moved on since Zeno's day, but that is not to say that the Arrow cannot speak to the kinds of issues that are now engaging us.

At the end of a characteristically detailed and illuminating commentary, Jonathan Barnes offers the following observation:

It is usually supposed that Zeno's paradox carries with it some philosophical theory about the nature of time; and Zeno's commentators regularly adduce rival theories in the course of their reflexions about it. […]