Vol. 23 No. 2 (2017)
Articles

Zeno’s Debt to Hippasus

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  • Dmitri Panchenko
Dmitri Panchenko
Saint Petersburg State University; Higher School of Economics in Saint Petersburg

Published 2018-06-19

Keywords

  • argumentum ad impossibile,
  • Hippasus,
  • incommensurability,
  • mathematics,
  • philosophy,
  • Zeno
    • ...More
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Creative Commons License

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.

How to Cite

Panchenko, D. (2018). Zeno’s Debt to Hippasus. Hyperboreus, 23(2), 208-223. https://doi.org/10.36950/hyperboreus.FAKN2486

Abstract

The way of argumentation employed by the Eleatic philosophers was repeatedly compared with methods of demonstration characteristic for Greek mathematics. The paper addresses a particular type of argument, argumentum ad impossibile, found in both Zeno’s antinomies and an ancient demonstration of the incommensurability of the side and diagonal of a square. It is argued that in this particular case the debtor was Zeno.

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