The Xenon Paradox

The Xenon Paradox

 

Someone commented on my Facebook post mentioning Prof. Hyung-Seok Kim and posted a recent photo of him lecturing. I was surprised to see that his current appearance at 104 years old is not much different from the one I remember from 57 years ago, when I was a freshman in college and he was lecturing on Introduction to Philosophy. Although I heard the names of many philosophers and philosophical theories during the half-year lecture, the only thing that still sticks in my mind is the ancient Greek philosopher Xenon and his paradox of the arrow.

 

To supplement my memory with a quick Google search, here's what I heard that day

"Assuming an arrow is flying, over time it will pass through a point. One moment it will be at a point, the next moment it will be at a point, and the next moment it will be at a point. The arrow always stays where it is, so it's not really moving." After introducing the paradox in a casual voice, Kim asked the students what they thought of the paradox, and they all said, "It doesn't make any sense.” Kim then asked if there was a logical refutation of the paradox, but no one stepped forward.

 

Xenon's description of an object's motion only considers the distance it traveled, not the time it took to move. In reality, the motion of an object must be compared by dividing the distance traveled by the time it took to move to get its velocity. In other words, the motion of an object is expressed by its speed. Therefore, this paradox can be easily refuted by classical physics, which deals with the concept of differentiation and the concept of motion. All of the students in my course had already studied differentiation and physics in depth when they were in high school, with the intention of majoring in engineering, so they could easily refute a paradox of this magnitude, but none of them did.

 

I was amazed that Xenon's paradox could be right or wrong, and that it was possible to see the behavior of things that way, and that the behavior of an arrow seen through the eyes of a philosopher could be so different from what we think of as common sense. The feeling I got from that lecture was so strong that for many years, the Professor Kim Hyung-Seok-Xenon-Arrow paradox sat in the back of my memory, and I would occasionally recall it.

 

But now I wonder why none of the students were able to answer Prof. Kim's question, even though it wasn't that difficult to refute. Here are my thoughts

   1. Maybe they gave up criticizing because they assumed that since it was a famous philosopher in history, there must not be something logically wrong with it. This seems to be due to a lack of critical consciousness, which is consistent with unconditional support for famous politicians, even if they have major faults.

   2. The professor who asked the question was a famous professor, so they may have been complacent and waited for the professor to summarize the conclusion rather than thinking deeply and raising counterarguments.

   3. There may have been many students who had the idea to raise a counterargument but didn't know how to refute it logically, so they kept their mouths shut.

 

In other words, the students of that time were all indoctrinated from an early age, and they were produced as idiots who could not think for themselves.

 

The reason why philosophy education is necessary is that it can develop critical thinking skills, the ability to argue logically, communication skills that can be developed in the process of debate, and empathy and solidarity skills that can be cultivated by building consensus.

 

As a liberal arts, other than the majors I studied to make a living during my four years at the university, Professor Kim Hyung-seok's Introduction to Philosophy gave me a fresh shock, and the paradox of the arrow raised by Zenon is still fresh in my memory decades later. For that reason alone, I believe that Introduction to Philosophy, a subject that I encountered for a short period, had a great impact on my life.

 

(July 4, 2024)