Must-read: Ada Palmer (2014): “Sketches of a History of Skepticism, Part I: Classical Eudaimonia”

Must-Read: Ada Palmer (2014): Sketches of a History of Skepticism, Part I: Classical Eudaimonia: “Our youth, whom we shall now leave panicking on the riverbank along with Socrates…

…Descartes, Sartre and, hopefully, a comfortable picnic, has now received the full impact of why Zeno’s paradoxes of motion matter. They aren’t supposed to convince you there’s no motion, they’re supposed to convince you that logic says there is no motion, therefore we cannot trust logic. Their intended target is any philosopher cough Plato cough Aristotle cough who wants to make the claim that we one can achieve certainty by weaving logic chains together. Anyone whose tool is Logic. Meanwhile, the stick in water attacks any philosopher who wants to rely on sense perception cough Aristotle cough Epicurus cough and say that we know things with certainty through Evidence. When you put both side-by-side, and demand that Zeno shoot an arrow at the stick in water that looks bent, then it seems that both Logic and Evidence are unreliable, and therefore that… there can be no certainty! Don’t panic, be happy…