born 0441; 495
died 0441; 430 BC
Greek philosopher and mathematician.
He was called by Aristotle the inventor of dialectic. He is best known for his paradoxes (see paradoxes of Zeno ). As a pupil and friend of Parmenides , he took it upon himself to reply to those who asserted that his master's doctrine of "the one" (i.e., indivisible reality) was inconsistent (see monism ); he tried to show that the assumption of the existence of "the many" (i.e., a plurality of things in time and space) carried with it more serious inconsistencies.