ABSTRACT
Only two traditions in the history of philosophy have found a serious problem in sorites paradoxes. One culminated in Stoicism; the other is modern analytic philosophy. The reason has to do with the centrality of formal logic in both traditions. The conclusiveness of formal proof makes a sorites paradox hard to fudge. Its premises once granted, its disastrous conclusion seems inescapable. This chapter describes the way in which the rise of modern logic at the end of the nineteenth century caused sorites paradoxes to become again a topic of philosophical discussion after two thousand years. There are, of course, obvious differences in the treatment of sorites paradoxes between the Stoics and early analytic philosophers. They can to some extent be explained by differences in their conceptions of logic.
