The Presumption of Movement

By -

The Presumption of Movement
Axiomathes , Volume 17, Number 2/137-154, July, 2007

Abstract
The conceptualisation of movement has always been problematical for Western thought, ever since Parmenides declared our incapacity to conceptualise the plurality of change because our self-identical thought can only know an identical being. Exploiting this peculiar feature and constraint on our thought, Zeno of Elea devised his famous paradoxes of movement in which he shows that the passage from a position to movement cannot be conceptualised. In this paper, I argue that this same constraint is at the root of our incapacity to conceptualise the unseen movement at the micro-level and that the aporetic idea of super-position far from opening the gate on a deeper reality is a symptomatic word for this lack of understanding.

Keywords : Zeno - Movement - Reality - Parmenides - Causality - Quantum reality - EPR - Einstein Podolsky Rosen - Quantum physics - Zeno's paradoxes

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

PhD Thesis, UCL, 1995, Time and Reality

By -
My original PhD thesis is now available online from UCL CLICK HERE for PDF In my thesis I analyse the nature and the limits of phenomenal observation: the impossibility for the human mind to understand the final structure of Being or, as it is otherwise called by science, the Universe. This investigation was partly prompted, in fact, by the claims of some respectable physicists that we will one day know everything or, as they often say, God’s mind. My thesis is built around the central chapter (the third) in which I analyse the nature of our understanding of events. There I claim that when subjected to a rigorous analysis, the concept of event as happening in time and occupying a duration of time, is somehow a paradoxical concept. While on the one hand an event requires to be thought of as covering a duration, on the other hand this necessary duration means that whatever event we observe, is not what is really happening. This is because its happening consists in whatever is happening ...
Read more

Why Mathematical Solutions Of Zeno's Paradoxes Miss The Point

By -
Why Mathematical Solutions Of Zeno's Paradoxes Miss The Point: Zeno's One And Many Relation And Parmenides' Prohibition The Review of Metaphysics 50 (December 1996): 299-314. ( Download article pdf ) MATHEMATICAL RESOLUTIONS OF ZENO's PARADOXES of motion have been offered on a regular basis since the paradoxes were first formulated. In this paper I will argue that such mathematical "solutions" miss, and always will miss, the point of Zeno's arguments. I do not think that any mathematical solution can provide the much sought after answers to any of the paradoxes of Zeno. In fact all mathematical attempts to resolve these paradoxes share a common feature, a feature that makes them consistently miss the fundamental point which is Zeno's concern for the one-many relation, or it would be better to say, lack of relation. This takes us back to the ancient dispute between the Eleatic school and the Pluralists. The first, following Parmeni...
Read more

Essays on the Roots of Secularization

By -
I am very (very) happy to announce that my second book has just been published by Peter Lang Orphans of the One or the Deception of the Immanence – Essays on the Roots of Secularization Overview A Collection of Essays in Metaphysics and Epistemology which explore the evolution of the idea of the One and Many, seen as the key principle to understand the process of secularization and immanentization of the One in the West. This process rather than promoting the life of the many has caused their progressive loss of meaning and value at the moral level, whilst at the epistemological level has meant the creation of unsolvable problems for western philosophical thought. In fact,the dichotomy of One and Many – where the One is seen as the identity of the form of thought, a self-evident truth to which Western thought has always tried to reduce the knowledge of phenomena - and the Many, as the dimension of change given in consciousness - is the key to understand and put in focus...
Read more