  The evidence surveyed here suggests that Zeno’s paradoxes were  designed as provocative challenges to the common-sense view that our  world is populated by numerous things that move from place to place.  His apparent demonstrations of how the common-sense view is fraught  with contradiction made him an influential precursor of sophistic  antilogic and eristic disputation. It is not surprising that someone  like Isocrates should have viewed Zeno as a sophist to be classed  with Protagoras and Gorgias. To ask whether Zeno was in fact a  sophist, a practitioner of antilogic, an eristic controversialist, or a proper dialectician is to some extent inappropriate, for these  designations all acquired their normal meaning and range of  application only after Zeno’s time. While he perhaps does not fit  exactly into any of these categories, still his development of  sophisticated methods of argumentation to produce apparent proofs of  the evidently false conclusions that motion is impossible and that  there are not in fact many things made it quite natural for Plato,  Aristotle, Isocrates, and others to refer to him under all these  labels. 