How did Zeno’s paradoxes raise questions about infinity and motion?

Zeno of Elea developed his paradoxes in the 5th century BCE to support the monistic philosophy of Parmenides, which held that reality is a single, motionless entity. By using reductio ad absurdum, Zeno aimed to show that the common-sense assumptions of plurality and motion lead to logical contradictions.123

His arguments regarding motion, such as the Achilles paradox, challenge the possibility of movement by highlighting the problem of the continuum. Zeno argued that to traverse any distance, an object must first reach an infinite number of halfway points. Because this requires completing an infinite number of tasks in a finite time, he concluded that motion is impossible.421

These paradoxes raised fundamental questions about infinity and divisibility, as they forced a confrontation between the concept of a finite distance and the mathematical implication that such a distance is infinitely divisible. While Aristotle attempted to resolve these by distinguishing between potential and actual infinity, the paradoxes remained a significant challenge to mathematical rigor until the development of modern concepts of continuity.34