Philosophy
c. 490 to 420 BC, Abdera
The first and greatest sophist: man is the measure of all things.
Start learning Protagoras →Protagoras opened his book Truth with the most famous sentence of the sophistic age: ‘Man is the measure of all things - of the things that are, that they are; of the things that are not, that they are not.’…
Protagoras’ relativism rests on a picture of a world in flux, perceived by perceivers who are themselves changing, so that perception is always an interaction yielding truth-for-each. Plato linked this to Heraclitus’ do…
Protagoras was the first professional sophist - a paid teacher who promised to make young men better : more excellent in managing their households and their city. He taught rhetoric, the art of argument on both sides, a…
Protagoras opened his book On the Gods with a famous declaration of agnosticism: ‘Concerning the gods, I cannot know whether they exist or not, nor of what form they are; many things prevent this knowledge - the o…
Condemned by Plato and reduced to a byword for fallacy, Protagoras was rehabilitated by modern thinkers who saw in ‘man is the measure’ a profound anticipation of pragmatism, perspectivism, and the modern cr…
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