  Whatever may have spurred Zeno’s development of his collection of  paradoxes, his arguments quickly achieved a remarkable level of  notoriety. They had an immediate impact on Greek physical theory.  Zeno’s powerful principle that any spatially extended entity must be  limitlessly divisible would profoundly impact the development of the  subtle and powerful physical theories of both Anaxagoras, who accepts the principle, and the early atomists, Leucippus and Democritus, who  reject it. Zeno’s arguments also had a formative influence on  Aristotle’s own theory of the continuum and of continuous motion.  More generally, Zeno’s arguments made it necessary for Greek natural  philosophers to develop something more than an everyday conception of the composition of material bodies. His arguments, perhaps more than  anything else, forced the Greek natural philosophers to develop  properly physical theories of composition as opposed to the  essentially chemical theories of earlier thinkers such as Empedocles. That mathematicians and physicists have worked ever since to develop  responses to the more ingenious of his paradoxes is remarkable,  though perhaps not surprising, for immunity to his paradoxes might be taken as a condition upon the adequacy of our most basic physical  concepts. He may even have offered his collection of paradoxes to  provoke deeper consideration of the adequacy of theretofore  unexamined notions. If so, it is likewise remarkable that he  simultaneously developed forms of argument—most notably,  reductio ad absurdum by means of antinomical and/or regress  arguments—that have ever since been fundamental to  philosophical probing of conceptual adequacy. 