Eleatica

Abstract

From January 15 to 18, 2009, the yearly Eleatica-Symposium organized under the scientific supervision of Livio Rossetti took place at the Alario Foundation in Ascea (Salerno-Italy), close to the ruins of ancient Hyele/Elea. The conference was held by Jonathan Barnes (Université Paris IV-Sorbonne), who spoke on Zeno and the Infinite. In truly Eleatic style he tackled Zeno’s paradoxes in a paradoxical way, maintaining the following three points: 1) if we want to understand Zeno’s paradoxes we can rely only on physics, 2) mathematics is therefore not able to solve these paradoxes; 3) from a general logical viewpoint it is not true that Zeno uses the term “infinite” as if it were the name of a number.