Supertasks, Physics and the Axiom of Infinity

Abstract

It seems reasonable to assume that mathematical infinity was not the objective of Zeno’s dichotomy (in any of its variants); however, some kind of mathematical infinity was already at stake in his celebrated arguments. Aristotle proposed a solution to Zeno’s dichotomy by introducing what we now call one-to-one correspondences, the key instrument of modern infinitist mathematics. But Aristotle, more a naturalist than a platonist, finally rejected the method of pairing the elements of two infinite collections (in the case at hand, points and instants) and introduced instead the distinction between actual and potential infinities.