Chiliagon

or an angle trisector, as the number of sides is neither a

product of distinct Pierpont primes, nor a power of two,
three, or six.

2 Philosophical application
Ren Descartes uses the chiliagon as an example in his
Sixth Meditation to demonstrate the dierence between
pure intellection and imagination. He says that, when one
thinks of a chiliagon, he does not imagine the thousand
sides or see them as if they were present before him
as he does when one imagines a triangle, for example.
The imagination constructs a confused representation,
which is no dierent from that which it constructs of a
myriagon (a polygon with ten thousand sides). However,
he does clearly understand what a chiliagon is, just as he
understands what a triangle is, and he is able to distinguish it from a myriagon. Therefore, the intellect is not
dependent on imagination, Descartes claims, as it is able
to entertain clear and distinct ideas when imagination is
unable to.[1] Philosopher Pierre Gassendi, a contemporary of Descartes, was critical of this interpretation, believing that while Descartes could imagine a chiliagon, he
could not understand it: one could perceive that the word
'chiliagon' signies a gure with a thousand angles [but]
that is just the meaning of the term, and it does not follow
that you understand the thousand angles of the gure any
better than you imagine them.[2]

A whole regular chiliagon is not visually discernible from a circle.

The lower section is a portion of a regular chiliagon, 200 times
as large as the smaller one, with the vertices highlighted.

In geometry, a chiliagon (pronounced /kli.n/) is a

polygon with 1000 sides. Several philosophers have used The example of a chiliagon is also referenced by other
it to illustrate issues regarding thought.
philosophers, such as Immanuel Kant.[3] David Hume
points out that it is impossible for the eye to determine the angles of a chiliagon to be equal to 1996 right
angles, or make any conjecture, that approaches this
1 Properties
proportion.[4] Gottfried Leibniz comments on a use of
The measure of each internal angle in a regular chiliagon the chiliagon by John Locke, noting that one can have an
is 179.64. The area of a regular chiliagon with sides of idea of the polygon without having an[5]image of it, and
thus distinguishing ideas from images.
length a is given by

Henri Poincar uses the chiliagon as evidence that intuition is not necessarily founded on the evidence of the

senses because we can not represent to ourselves a chilA = 250a2 cot

79577.2 a2
1000
iagon, and yet we reason by intuition on polygons in genThis result diers from the area of its circumscribed circle eral, which include the chiliagon as a particular case.[6]
by less than 0.0004%.
Inspired by Descartess chiliagon example, Roderick
Because 1000 = 23 53 , the number of sides is neither
a product of distinct Fermat primes nor a power of two.
Thus the regular chiliagon is not a constructible polygon.
Indeed, it is not even constructible with the use of neusis

Chisholm and other 20th-century philosophers have used

similar examples to make similar points. Chisholms
speckled hen, which need not have a determinate number of speckles to be successfully imagined, is perhaps
1

the most famous of these.[7]

See also
Myriagon
Megagon

References

[1] Meditation VI by Descartes (English translation).

[2] Sepkoski, David (2005).
Nominalism and constructivism in seventeenth-century mathematical
philosophy.
Historia Mathematica 32:
3359.
doi:10.1016/j.hm.2003.09.002. Retrieved 9 February
2014.
[3] Immanuel Kant, On a Discovery, trans. Henry Allison,
in Theoretical Philosophy After 1791, ed. Henry Allison
and Peter Heath, Cambridge UP, 2002 [Akademie 8:121].
Kant does not actually use a chiliagon as his example, instead using a 96-sided gure, but he is responding to the
same question raised by Descartes.
[4] David Hume, The Philosophical Works of David Hume,
Volume 1, Black and Tait, 1826, p. 101.
[5] Jonathan Francis Bennett (2001), Learning from Six
Philosophers: Descartes, Spinoza, Leibniz, Locke, Berkeley, Hume, Volume 2, Oxford University Press, ISBN
0198250924, p. 53.
[6] Henri Poincar (1900) Intuition and Logic in Mathematics in William Bragg Ewald (ed) From Kant to Hilbert: A
Source Book in the Foundations of Mathematics, Volume
2, Oxford University Press, 2007, ISBN 0198505361, p.
1015.
[7] Roderick Chisholm, The Problem of the Speckled Hen,
Mind 51 (1942): pp. 368373. These problems are
all descendants of Descartess 'chiliagon' argument in the
sixth of his Meditations (Joseph Heath, Following the
Rules: Practical Reasoning and Deontic Constraint, Oxford: OUP, 2008, p. 305, note 15).

REFERENCES

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