Epimenides paradox

It is named after the Cretan philosopher Epimenides of Knossos (alive circa 600 BC) who is credited with the original statement.

The study of self-reference led to important developments in logic and mathematics in the twentieth century.

Further, a more poignant answer to the paradox is simply that to be a liar is to state falsehoods, nothing in the statement asserts everything said is false, but rather they're "always" lying.

Epimenides was a 6th-century BC philosopher and religious prophet who, against the general sentiment of Crete, proposed that Zeus was immortal, as in the following poem: They fashioned a tomb for thee, O holy and high oneThe Cretans, always liars, evil beasts, idle bellies!But thou art not dead: thou livest and abidest forever,For in thee we live and move and have our being.Denying the immortality of Zeus, then, was the lie of the Cretans.

In the 1st century AD, the quote is mentioned by the author of the Epistle to Titus as having been spoken truly by "one of their own prophets."

For this reason correct them sternly, that they may be sound in faith instead of paying attention to Jewish fables and to commandments of people who turn their backs on the truth."

Clement of Alexandria, in the late 2nd century AD, fails to indicate that the concept of logical paradox is an issue: In his epistle to Titus, Apostle Paul wants to warn Titus that Cretans don't believe in the one truth of Christianity, because "Cretans are always liars".

During the early 4th century, Saint Augustine restates the closely related liar paradox in Against the Academicians (III.13.29), but without mentioning Epimenides.

In the Middle Ages, many forms of the liar paradox were studied under the heading of insolubilia, but these were not explicitly associated with Epimenides.

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.

church father Isho'dad of Merv (probably based on the work of Theodore of Mopsuestia), which J.R. Harris translated back into Gr.

"The Epimenides paradox appears explicitly in "Mathematical Logic as Based on the Theory of Types", by Bertrand Russell, in the American Journal of Mathematics, volume 30, number 3 (July, 1908), pages 222–262, which opens with the following: The oldest contradiction of the kind in question is the Epimenides.

Typical of these references is Gödel, Escher, Bach by Douglas Hofstadter, which accords the paradox a prominent place in a discussion of self-reference.