And the Hi, I'm Peter Adamson, and you're listening to the History of Philosophy podcast, brought to you with the support of King's College London and the Lever Hume Trust.

Today's episode, You Can't Get There From Here, the Eleatic Philosophy of Zeno and Molissis.

Imagine you're standing at the baseline of a town. of Xeno and Moliss.

Imagine you're standing at the baseline of a tennis court. That's the line at the back where you serve from.

It's time to change sides,

so you are about to walk straight across

to the other end of the court.

You set off undertaking a journey of almost 24 meters, the length of a regulation court.

It doesn't seem particularly daunting.

When you get halfway, of course, there will be a net blocking your path, but you figure

you'll cope with that problem when you get to it.

Maybe you can leap over it jauntily, the way tennis players used to do at the end of the

match. But before you get to the net, which looms some 12 meters in the distance, you'll be arriving at the line drawn halfway across your side of the court.

As those of you who are tennis experts know, this is called the service line.

At that point, you will have completed a quarter of your trip, having walked about six meters.

But of course to do that, you first got to get halfway to the service line.

You need to walk three meters forward.

And of course to do that you've got to walk half of those three meters.

It's starting to look a bit more daunting now, isn't it? In fact, now that you think

about it, there is quite literally an infinite number of things you need to do to walk to the

far side of the court. To get to any point you will need to travel halfway to that point and halfway to that halfway point and so on.

There's no end to the halfway points you'll need to visit. You better bring a packed lunch.

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