Bertrand Russell Paradox Of The Arrow Summary

Bertrand Russell offers views on motion and change which directly contradict the experience of humans. This discrepancy alone is not enough to discredit his ideas, but makes the argument somewhat of an uphill battle. I aim to somewhat illuminate his stance, however the very obvious issues with it must be addressed. In agreement with Zeno, Russell believes our universe is unchanging, accepting the Paradox of the Arrow as a refutation of a dynamic world. Because we can only experience one instant at a time, we may only make claims about the present moment, and in an infinitesimally small moment there cannot be any movement or change. Accordingly so, the arrow is at rest at a given instant. This seems to align Russell with Idealism, along with Zeno. As an Idealist, Russell would probably assert that our perception of the world as dynamic is simply an illusion. Change, motion, and even time are all just constructs of the human mind, with the purpose of aiding us in interpreting and navigating our world. Where Bertrand Russell deviates from

However, if he is so quick to distrust our perceptions, why would he assume that an arrow stationary at a given instant doesn’t have the quality of motion? To accept the paradox, one assumes that our senses could observe all of the qualities of the arrow in this imaginary timeless state. But this would mean that the arrow’s inertia simply ceases to exist, only to return if time is reintroduced. It could be argued that inertia is then related to time and not the arrow itself. But we must remember that in suspending time we are removing a dimension from the arrow. In this sense, we could instead remove a spatial dimension from the arrow, say, its length. Could it then be argued that the arrow’s length was actually a quality of that spatial dimension and not the arrow? Pretty soon, you’re going to run out of anything to call the