Page:Early Greek philosophy by John Burnet, 3rd edition, 1920.djvu/327

 Rh these discourses were subdivided into sections, each dealing with some one presupposition of his adversaries. We owe the preservation of Zeno's arguments on the one and many to Simplicius. Those relating to motion have been preserved by Aristotle; but he has restated them in his own language.

157. Aristotle in his Sophist called Zeno the inventor of dialectic, and that, no doubt, is substantially true, though the beginnings at least of this method of arguing were contemporary with the foundation of the Eleatic school. Plato gives us a spirited account of the style and purpose of Zeno's book, which he puts into his own mouth:

The method of Zeno was, in fact, to take one of his adversaries' fundamental postulates and deduce from it two contradictory conclusions. This is what Aristotle meant