Zeno's paradoxes state that if one were to examine individual moments of an object moving in a given direction, (as with an arrow flying towards a target) or overtaking a second, slower object, (as with
Achilles challenging a tortoise to a race) one would not actually be able to find a moment of the act of change or motion taking place, thus proving Zeno's view of motion as illusory and impossible. The literal originates with
Diogenes the Cynic in an account by
Simplicius of Cilicia of a debate against Zeno; upon hearing his opponent's argument, Diogenes silently rose and walked away, thus implying the reality of motion to be so self-evident that any attempt to debate it is meaningless. The debate is retold by
Pushkin in his eight line poem "
Motion" (1825), with further reference to the
apparent motion of the
sun in a seeming contrast to
Galileo's
heliocentric system. The phrase appears early in
Lewis Carroll's "
What the Tortoise Said to Achilles", where Achilles uses it to accentuate that he was indeed successful in overtaking Tortoise in their race to empirically test one of Zeno's paradoxes. This passage also appears in
Douglas Hofstadter's book
Gödel, Escher, Bach (1979). Later assertions of a superficially obvious reality in the face of abstract philosophical quandaries include Dr Samuel Johnson's
appeal to the stone and
Ludwig Wittgenstein's "hinge" epistemology. ==Other uses==