Russell’s lecture provides another introduction to the paradoxes, but he also says more about their solution than Salmon did in the part of the introduction that I assigned. So this selection provides us with an opportunity to look more closely at the arguments, and you should follow out this opportunity in two ways.
• Pay attention to the alternative interpretations of Zeno that Russell describes and ask yourself which seems more plausible (and ask yourself also whether still further alternative interpretations are possible).
• Be sure to think through the solutions he offers both in order to understand them and to look for ways in which you (or someone else) might find them unsatisfying.
Russell originally delivered these lectures in 1914 when modern mathematical thinking about infinity was still relatively new (it dates to Georg Cantor’s work in the late 1870s and early 1880s) and one of the things he is doing in this lecture, especially pp. 55-58, is to present and apply some of these ideas. So one natural topic for us to discuss is the nature of infinity.
Although I haven’t assigned the following short selection from Bergson (which also dates from the years just before WWI), you might look at it for an alternative point of view. He sketches (on pp. 59-63) what he calls the “cinematographic” perspective, which he takes to be, in a way, unavoidable in our thinking but still misleading; and he then applies these ideas to the paradoxes (on pp. 63-66).