The Unexpected Hanging Paradox
A prisoner is told he will hang next week, on a day he cannot possibly predict. He proves it cannot happen. It happens.
1943 (in circulation), 1948 (first in print)21 min read
American analytic philosophy and logic
Willard Van Orman Quine
1908 – 2000
Philosopher and logician at Harvard for most of his career. He supplied the vocabulary this site uses for classifying paradoxes — veridical, falsidical, antinomy — in "The Ways of Paradox" (1962). His two-page note "On a So-called Paradox" (1953) located the flaw in the condemned prisoner's reasoning at its very first step.