  Zeno of Elea, 5th c. B.C.E. thinker, is known exclusively for  propounding a number of ingenious paradoxes. The most famous of these purport to show that motion is impossible by bringing to light  apparent or latent contradictions in ordinary assumptions regarding  its occurrence. Zeno also argued against the commonsense assumption  that there are many things by showing in various ways how it, too,  leads to contradiction. We may never know just what led Zeno to  develop his famous paradoxes. While it is typically said that he  aimed to defend the paradoxical monism of his Eleatic mentor,  Parmenides, the Platonic evidence on which this view has resided  ultimately fails to support it. Since Zeno’s arguments in fact tend  to problematize the application of quantitative conceptions to  physical bodies and to spatial expanses as ordinarily conceived, the  paradoxes may have originated in reflection upon Pythagorean efforts  to apply mathematical notions to the natural world. Zeno’s paradoxes  have had a lasting impact through the attempts, from Aristotle down  to the present day, to respond to the problems they raise. Since the  subject of this article is Zeno himself, it undertakes to provide an  historically accurate overview of his own thought, rather than an  account of how philosophers, mathematicians, and physicists have  responded to his provocative arguments.