Paradox

42 A BRIEF HISTORY OF THE PARADOXIsland to its eastern extreme. The reporter thanked me. Ifelt I had nipped the problem in the bud.Later I heard back from a dissatisfied publicity officer.Why was the chairman of the philosophy department callingthe president of the United States a “space-time worm”? WhenI obtained a copy of the newspaper, I was chagrined to learnthat the philosophical community had been credited with thediscovery of a new enigma about the inaugural photographs.We heirs of the glorious Greek tradition were whiling awayour days in debates about the Great Inaugural PhotographIssue (apparently taking a break from our usual controversyabout how many angels can dance on the head of a pin).The reporter cast a shadow over my ambitions as anacademic administrator. I knew how one of my fellow admirersof Parmenides must have felt. Pericles had been aneffective Athenian statesman. Then he quarreled with hiseldest son, Xanthippus. His angry sonthought himself so ill used and disobliged, that he openlyreviled his father; telling first, by way of ridicule, storiesabout his conversations at home, and the discourses he hadwith the sophists and scholars that came to his house. As forinstance, how one who was a practiser of the five games ofskill, having with a dart or javelin unawares against his willstruck and killed Epitimus the Pharsalian, his father spenta whole day with Protagoras in a serious dispute, whetherthe javelin, or the man that threw it, or the masters of thegames who appointed these sports, were to be accounted thecause of this mischance. (Plutarch 1880, 122)Although Pericles was Athens’s most famous democrat,his aristocratic background and his penchant for philosophi-