
The Epimenides paradox reveals a problem with
self-reference
Self-reference occurs in natural or formal languages when a sentence, idea or formula refers to itself. The reference may be expressed either directly—through some intermediate sentence or formula—or by means of some encoding. In philos ...
in
logic
Logic is the study of correct reasoning. It includes both formal and informal logic. Formal logic is the science of deductively valid inferences or of logical truths. It is a formal science investigating how conclusions follow from premis ...
. It is named after the
Cretan
Crete ( el, Κρήτη, translit=, Modern: , Ancient: ) is the largest and most populous of the Greek islands, the 88th largest island in the world and the fifth largest island in the Mediterranean Sea, after Sicily, Sardinia, Cyprus, and ...
philosopher Epimenides
Epimenides of Cnossos (or Epimenides of Crete) (; grc-gre, Ἐπιμενίδης) was a semi- mythical 7th or 6th century BC Greek seer and philosopher-poet, from Knossos or Phaistos.
Life
While tending his father's sheep, Epimenides is sa ...
of
Knossos
Knossos (also Cnossos, both pronounced ; grc, Κνωσός, Knōsós, ; Linear B: ''Ko-no-so'') is the largest Bronze Age archaeological site on Crete and has been called Europe's oldest city.
Settled as early as the Neolithic period, the na ...
(alive circa 600 BC) who is credited with the original statement. A typical description of the problem is given in the book ''
Gödel, Escher, Bach
''Gödel, Escher, Bach: an Eternal Golden Braid'', also known as ''GEB'', is a 1979 book by Douglas Hofstadter.
By exploring common themes in the lives and works of logician Kurt Gödel, artist M. C. Escher, and composer Johann Sebastian Bach, th ...
'', by
Douglas Hofstadter
Douglas Richard Hofstadter (born February 15, 1945) is an American scholar of cognitive science, physics, and comparative literature whose research includes concepts such as the sense of self in relation to the external world, consciousness, an ...
:
A
paradox
A paradox is a logically self-contradictory statement or a statement that runs contrary to one's expectation. It is a statement that, despite apparently valid reasoning from true premises, leads to a seemingly self-contradictory or a logically u ...
of
self-reference
Self-reference occurs in natural or formal languages when a sentence, idea or formula refers to itself. The reference may be expressed either directly—through some intermediate sentence or formula—or by means of some encoding. In philos ...
arises when one considers whether it is possible for Epimenides to have spoken the truth.
Mythology of lying Cretans
According to
Ptolemaeus Chennus,
Thetis
Thetis (; grc-gre, Θέτις ), is a figure from Greek mythology with varying mythological roles. She mainly appears as a sea nymph, a goddess of water, or one of the 50 Nereids, daughters of the ancient sea god Nereus.
When described as ...
and
Medea
In Greek mythology
A major branch of classical mythology, Greek mythology is the body of myths originally told by the ancient Greeks, and a genre of Ancient Greek folklore. These stories concern the origin and nature of the world, the ...
had once argued in
Thessaly
Thessaly ( el, Θεσσαλία, translit=Thessalía, ; ancient Thessalian: , ) is a traditional geographic and modern administrative region of Greece, comprising most of the ancient region of the same name. Before the Greek Dark Ages, The ...
over which was the most beautiful; they appointed the Cretan
Idomeneus
In Greek mythology, Idomeneus (; el, Ἰδομενεύς) was a Cretan king and commander who led the Cretan armies to the Trojan War, in eighty black ships. He was also one of the suitors of Helen, as well as a comrade of the Telamonian Ajax. ...
as the judge, who gave the victory to Thetis.
In her anger, Medea called all
Cretans
Crete ( el, Κρήτη, translit=, Modern: , Ancient: ) is the largest and most populous of the Greek islands, the 88th largest island in the world and the fifth largest island in the Mediterranean Sea, after Sicily, Sardinia, Cyprus, and ...
liars, and cursed them to never say the truth.
Logical paradox
Thomas Fowler (1869) states the paradox as follows: "Epimenides the Cretan says, 'that all the Cretans are liars,' but Epimenides is himself a Cretan; therefore he is himself a liar. But if he is a liar, what he says is untrue, and consequently, the Cretans are veracious; but Epimenides is a Cretan, and therefore what he says is true; saying the Cretans are liars, Epimenides is himself a liar, and what he says is untrue. Thus we may go on alternately proving that Epimenides and the Cretans are truthful and untruthful."
Origin of the phrase
Epimenides was a 6th-century BC philosopher and religious prophet who, against the general sentiment of Crete, proposed that
Zeus
Zeus or , , ; grc, Δῐός, ''Diós'', label=genitive Boeotian Aeolic and Laconian grc-dor, Δεύς, Deús ; grc, Δέος, ''Déos'', label=genitive el, Δίας, ''Días'' () is the sky and thunder god in ancient Greek religion, ...
was immortal, as in the following
poem
Poetry (derived from the Greek '' poiesis'', "making"), also called verse, is a form of literature that uses aesthetic and often rhythmic qualities of language − such as phonaesthetics, sound symbolism, and metre − to evoke meanings ...
:
Denying the immortality of Zeus, then, was the lie of the Cretans.
The phrase "Cretans, always liars" was quoted by the poet
Callimachus
Callimachus (; ) was an ancient Greek poet, scholar and librarian who was active in Alexandria during the 3rd century BC. A representative of Ancient Greek literature of the Hellenistic period, he wrote over 800 literary works in a wide variet ...
in his ''Hymn to Zeus'', with the same theological intent as Epimenides:
Emergence as a logical contradiction
The logical inconsistency of a Cretan asserting all Cretans are always liars may not have occurred to Epimenides, nor to
Callimachus
Callimachus (; ) was an ancient Greek poet, scholar and librarian who was active in Alexandria during the 3rd century BC. A representative of Ancient Greek literature of the Hellenistic period, he wrote over 800 literary works in a wide variet ...
, who both used the phrase to emphasize their point, without irony, perhaps meaning that all Cretans lie routinely, but not exclusively.
In the 1st century AD, the quote is mentioned by the author of the
Epistle to Titus
The Epistle to Titus is one of the three pastoral epistles (along with 1 Timothy and 2 Timothy) in the New Testament, historically attributed to Paul the Apostle. It is addressed to Saint Titus and describes the requirements and duties of elde ...
as having been spoken truly by "one of their own prophets."
Clement of Alexandria
Titus Flavius Clemens, also known as Clement of Alexandria ( grc , Κλήμης ὁ Ἀλεξανδρεύς; – ), was a Christian theologian and philosopher who taught at the Catechetical School of Alexandria. Among his pupils were Origen an ...
, in the late 2nd century AD, fails to indicate that the concept of logical paradox is an issue:
During the early 4th century,
Saint Augustine
Augustine of Hippo ( , ; la, Aurelius Augustinus Hipponensis; 13 November 354 – 28 August 430), also known as Saint Augustine, was a theologian and philosopher of Berber origin and the bishop of Hippo Regius in Numidia, Roman North Afri ...
restates the closely related liar paradox in ''
Against the Academicians'' (III.13.29), but without mentioning Epimenides.
In the
Middle Ages
In the history of Europe, the Middle Ages or medieval period lasted approximately from the late 5th to the late 15th centuries, similar to the post-classical period of global history. It began with the fall of the Western Roman Empire ...
, many forms of the liar paradox were studied under the heading of
insolubilia, but these were not explicitly associated with Epimenides.
Finally, in 1740, the second volume of
Pierre Bayle
Pierre Bayle (; 18 November 1647 – 28 December 1706) was a French philosopher, author, and lexicographer. A Huguenot, Bayle fled to the Dutch Republic in 1681 because of religious persecution in France. He is best known for his '' Historica ...
's ''
Dictionnaire Historique et Critique'' explicitly connects Epimenides with the paradox, though Bayle labels the paradox a "sophisme".
[ '' Dictionnaire Historique et Critique'' at Wikipedia.]
References by other authors
All of the works of Epimenides are now lost, and known only through quotations by other authors. The quotation from the ''Cretica'' of Epimenides is given by R.N. Longenecker, "Acts of the Apostles", in volume 9 of ''The Expositor's Bible Commentary'',
Frank E. Gaebelein, editor (Grand Rapids, Michigan: Zondervan Corporation, 1976–1984), page 476. Longenecker in turn cites M.D. Gibson, ''Horae Semiticae X'' (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1913), page 40, "in
Syriac Syriac may refer to:
* Syriac language, an ancient dialect of Middle Aramaic
*Sureth, one of the modern dialects of Syriac spoken in the Nineveh Plains region
* Syriac alphabet
** Syriac (Unicode block)
** Syriac Supplement
* Neo-Aramaic languages ...
". Longenecker states the following in a footnote:
An oblique reference to Epimenides in the context of logic appears in "The Logical Calculus" by W. E. Johnson, ''Mind'' (New Series), volume 1, number 2 (April, 1892), pages 235–250. Johnson writes in a footnote,
The Epimenides paradox appears explicitly in "Mathematical Logic as Based on the Theory of Types", by
Bertrand Russell
Bertrand Arthur William Russell, 3rd Earl Russell, (18 May 1872 – 2 February 1970) was a British mathematician, philosopher, logician, and public intellectual. He had a considerable influence on mathematics, logic, set theory, linguistics, ar ...
, in the ''American Journal of Mathematics'', volume 30, number 3 (July, 1908), pages 222–262, which opens with the following:
In that article, Russell uses the Epimenides paradox as the point of departure for discussions of other problems, including the
Burali-Forti paradox
In set theory, a field of mathematics, the Burali-Forti paradox demonstrates that constructing "the set of all ordinal numbers" leads to a contradiction and therefore shows an antinomy in a system that allows its construction. It is named after ...
and the paradox now called
Russell's paradox
In mathematical logic, Russell's paradox (also known as Russell's antinomy) is a set-theoretic paradox discovered by the British philosopher and mathematician Bertrand Russell in 1901. Russell's paradox shows that every set theory that contain ...
. Since Russell, the Epimenides paradox has been referenced repeatedly in logic. Typical of these references is ''
Gödel, Escher, Bach
''Gödel, Escher, Bach: an Eternal Golden Braid'', also known as ''GEB'', is a 1979 book by Douglas Hofstadter.
By exploring common themes in the lives and works of logician Kurt Gödel, artist M. C. Escher, and composer Johann Sebastian Bach, th ...
'' by
Douglas Hofstadter
Douglas Richard Hofstadter (born February 15, 1945) is an American scholar of cognitive science, physics, and comparative literature whose research includes concepts such as the sense of self in relation to the external world, consciousness, an ...
, which accords the paradox a prominent place in a discussion of self-reference.
It is also believed that the "Cretan tales" told by
Odysseus
Odysseus ( ; grc-gre, Ὀδυσσεύς, Ὀδυσεύς, OdysseúsOdyseús, ), also known by the Latin variant Ulysses ( , ; lat, UlyssesUlixes), is a legendary Greek king of Ithaca and the hero of Homer's epic poem the ''Odyssey''. Odys ...
in
''The Odyssey'' by
Homer
Homer (; grc, Ὅμηρος , ''Hómēros'') (born ) was a Greek poet who is credited as the author of the '' Iliad'' and the '' Odyssey'', two epic poems that are foundational works of ancient Greek literature. Homer is considered one of ...
are a reference to this paradox.
Notes
References
External links
*
{{Paradoxes
Self-referential paradoxes
Paul the Apostle
New Testament words and phrases
Ancient Crete
ru:Эпименид#Парадокс Эпименида