"Observation and common sense were what some Greek philosophers were apparently lacking."

Thats nuts.

You obviously don't know anything about greek philosophy, nor about the infamous discussion. Nor about what really heavy and basic scientific issues are involved in this story that you have so poorly interpreted with so much arrogance.

Zeno wasn't really trying to actually say the turtle would win (or that the arrow would never hit its mark), but rather that if you accepted certain philosophical notions you would arrive at a contradiction- that a turtle could out race Achilles. Everyone knows (ala the common sense you are crowing so smugly about) the turtle could not outrace Achilles, therefore the premises argued from MUST be false.

Start with certain premises, come up with an obvious contradiction logically arrived at from those premises, well then there must be something lacking or incorrect about those premises.

Its called a Reductio.

It turns out that the conundrum was most definately not arising from any lack of observation or common sense on the part of Zeno (or the greeks in general), but instead about the limits of mathematics and observation. Zeno was, if anything, pointing out a primordial halting problem, or an ancient godels thorem. Zeno was pointing out that the naive notions of motion, change and divisibility, as understood at that time, could lead to contradiction, and that then maybe our notions of motion, change and divisibility were faulty. Its not insane to suggest this, for example we all understand that the 'common sense' notion of matter derived from our day-to-day interaction with it is entirely faulty.

It turns out that you need a rigorous notion of the infinite and a notion of series and summation to give a really good detonation of zenos argument. All of these were not available to the greeks at the time. Common sense tells us that Zeno was wrong, good, thats what Zeno was after.

Todays common sense is last centuries profound and subtle point of reason. You dismiss their poverty of knowledge with this certain arrogance of having access to understandings that you didn't have to come up with on your own. You seem to think that ignorance has only itself to blame, not that knowledge is actually something slowly deduced and squeezed from a mad noisy universe one drop at a time over generations (aside from the occasional Einstein, Turing and Godel). You indict the thinkers of the past as purposefully ignorant or self deluded. Thats a really absurd way of looking at things.

If youre so smart, drop a Grand Unified Theory, right now...

Ah, I see, you must be willfully ignorant and lacking common sense.

You made a simmilar argument about how europe, the greeks, etc weren't smart enough to come up with or practice democracy, you make a lot of these stupid historically ignorant claims. I wish you would stop doing this.

Davin :.