Protagoras

Protagoras Click here for more free books!

(born 485, Abdera, Greece — died c. 410 BC) Greek philosopher, first and most famous of the sophists. He spent most of his life at Athens, where he considerably influenced contemporary thought on moral and political questions. Plato named one of his dialogues after him. Protagoras claimed to teach men "virtue" in the conduct of their daily lives. He is best known for his dictum, "Man is the measure of all things" (see relativism; ethical relativism). Though he adopted conventional moral ideas, his work Concerning the Gods advocated agnosticism regarding religious belief. He was accused of impiety, his books were publicly burned, and he was exiled from Athens c. 415 BC.

For more information on Protagoras, visit Britannica.com.

The Greek philosopher Protagoras (ca. 484-ca. 414 B.C.) was one of the best-known and most successful teachers of the Sophistic movement of the 5th century B.C.

Protagoras was born in Abdera, the native city of Democritus, and spent much of his life as an itinerant Sophist, traveling throughout the Greek world. He was a frequent visitor to Athens, being a friend of Pericles, and was said to have aided in framing the constitution for the colony of Thurii, which the Athenians established in southern Italy in 444/443 B.C. Plato said that Protagoras spent 40 years teaching and that he died at the age of 70. Stories about an indictment against Protagoras by the Athenians, the burning of his books, and his death at sea are probably fictitious.

Sophist Philosophy

Protagoras earned his livelihood giving lectures and instruction to individuals and groups. The system he taught had little to do with philosophy or the pursuit of an absolute truth; instead it imparted to its adherents the necessary skills and knowledge for success in life, especially in politics. These skills consisted mainly of rhetoric and dialectic and could be used for whatever ends a person desired. It was for this reason, for teaching people "to make the weaker cause the stronger, " that Protagoras came under attack, indirectly by Aristophanes in The Clouds and directly by Plato in several of his dialogues.

Protagoras wrote on a wide variety of subjects. Fragments of some of his works survive, and the titles of others are known through later comments on them. His famous dictum "man is the measure of all things" is the opening sentence of a work variously called Truth or Refutatory Arguments. He also wrote On the Gods, a fragment of which survives. In it he says that the obscurity of the subject and the shortness of human life prevent any definite conclusions. Other works include The Great Argument, Contradictory Arguments, On Mathematics, and The Art of Eristics. The list of titles preserved in the works of the Greek biographer Diogenes Laertius may represent sections of larger works, whereas such titles as On Ambition, On Virtues, On Human Errors, and Trial Concerning a Fee almost certainly represent discussions of the common themes of Sophistic speeches. The chronology of these works is unknown.

Protagoras was a perfect example of the 5th-century Sophist. Careful thinkers could, of course, easily undermine the basis of his relative theory of knowledge; but the attractiveness of his theory and the pervasive influence of his teachings were so great that no less an opponent than Plato went to great lengths to expose the fallacies and potential evil of what he represented.

Further Reading

The surviving fragments of Protagoras's works are collected in H. Diels and W. Kranz, Die Fragmente der Vorsokratiker, translated in Kathleen Freeman, Ancilla to the Pre-Socratic Philosophers (1948), and discussed in her The Pre-Socratic Philosophers (1946; 3d ed. 1953). An excellent discussion of the Sophists and their contributions to Greek culture is in Werner Jaeger, Paideia: The Ideals of Greek Culture, translated by Gilbert Highet, vol. 1 (1939; 2d ed. 1945). A brief but useful account of Protagoras's importance can be found in Albin Lesky, A History of Greek Literature (1966).

Protagoras, dialogue by Plato in which the interlocutors are, besides Socrates, the sophists Protagoras (see above), Hippias, and Prodicus. It is a dialogue on the nature of ‘virtue’ (or ‘goodness’; see above), what it is and how it is to be acquired. Protagoras argues that virtue (in his sense) is something that can be taught just as well as any other subject. The dialogue reaches the conclusion that all the virtues are essentially one, founded upon knowledge of the good, and that virtue is in fact knowledge. In the course of the dialogue a poem of Simonides is analysed, an encomium on ‘the good man’ this dialogue remains its only source (see PITTACUS).

Protagoras is presented as a reasonable man, sincere in his arguments and of equable temperament, not provoked by Socrates' sometimes biting irony at his expense. His arguments are thoughtful and based on common sense; those of Socrates more searching and also paradoxical. The dialogue contains a noteworthy declaration by Protagoras that under a rational system criminals are punished to deter them from doing wrong again, not as retribution for past misdeeds.

For other uses, see Protagoras (disambiguation).

Protagoras

Western Philosophy Pre-Socratic philosophy
Full name	Protagoras (Πρωταγόρας)
Born	ca. 480
Died	411 BC
School/tradition	Ionian Philosophy
Main interests	language, semantics, relativism
Notable ideas	The "Antilogies", which consists of two premises: the first is "Before any uncertainty two opposite theses can validly be confronted", the second is its complement: the need to "strengthen the weaker argument".
Influenced Plato, Jeremy Bentham, Friedrich Nietzsche , F.C.S. Schiller

Protagoras (Greek: Πρωταγόρας) (ca. 490– 420 BC) was a pre-Socratic Greek philosopher and is numbered as one of the sophists by Plato. In his dialogue Protagoras, Plato credits him with having invented the role of the professional sophist or teacher of virtue. He is also believed to have created a major controversy during ancient times through his statement that man is the measure of all things. This idea was very revolutionary for the time and contrasting to other philosophical doctrines that claimed the universe was based on something objective, outside the human influence.

Contents 1 Background 2 Philosophy 3 Book Burning story 4 References

Background

Protagoras was born in Abdera, Thrace, in Ancient Greece. "In Plato's Protagoras, before the company of Socrates, Prodicus, and Hippias, he states that he is old enough to be the father of any of them. This suggests a date of not later than 490 BC"^[1] In the Meno (91e) he is said to have died at about the age of 70 after 40 years as a practicing Sophist. His death, then, may be assumed to have occurred circa 420."^[2] He was well-known in Athens and became a friend of Pericles.^[3]

Plutarch relates a story in which the two spend a whole day discussing an interesting point of legal responsibility, that probably involved a more philosophical question of causation.^[4] "In an athletic contest a man had been accidentally hit and killed with a javelin. Was his death to be attributed to the javelin itself, to the man who threw it, or to the authorities responsible for the conduct of the games?"^[5]

Philosophy

Protagoras was also renowned as a teacher who addressed subjects connected to virtue and political life. He was especially involved in the question of whether virtue could be taught, a commonplace issue of 5th Century BC. Greece (and related to modern readers through Plato's dialogue). Rather than educators who offered specific, practical training in rhetoric and public speaking, Protagoras attempted to formulate a reasoned understanding, on a very general level, of a wide range of human phenomena (for example, language and education). He also seems to have had an interest in orthoepeia, or the correct use of words (a topic more strongly associated with his fellow-sophist Prodicus).

His most famous saying is: "Man is the measure of all things: of things which are, that they are, and of things which are not, that they are not".^[6] Like many fragments of the Presocratics, this phrase has been passed down to us without any context, and its meaning is open to interpretation. Plato ascribes relativism to Protagoras and uses his predecessor's teachings as a foil for his own commitment to objective and transcendent realities and values. Plato also ascribes to Protagoras an early form of phenomenalism,^[7] in which what is or appears for a single individual is true or real for that individual.

Protagoras was a proponent of agnosticism. In his lost work, On the Gods, he wrote: "Concerning the gods, I have no means of knowing whether they exist or not or of what sort they may be, because of the obscurity of the subject, and the brevity of human life.^[8] (80B4 DK)

Very few fragments from Protagoras have survived, though he is known to have written several different works: Antilogiae and Truth. The latter is cited by Plato, and was known alternatively as 'The Throws' (a wrestling term referring to the attempt to floor an opponent). It began with the "man the measure" pronouncement. The crater Protagoras on the Moon is named in his honor.

Book Burning story

According to Diogenes Laertius, the above outspoken Agnostic position taken by Protagoras aroused anger, causing the Athenians to expel him from the city, and all copies of the book were collected and burned in the marketplace; this is also mentioned by Cicero ^[9]. However, the Classicist John Burnet doubts this account, as both Diogenes Laertius and Cicero wrote hundreds of years later and no such persecution of Protagoras is mentioned by contemporaries who make extensive references to this philosopher^[10]. Burnet notes that even if some copies of Protagoras' book were burned, enough of them survived to be known and discussed in the following century.

References

1. ^ Guthrie, Williams. The Sophists. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1971. ISBN 0521096669. p. 262-3.
2. ^ Ibid.
3. ^ O'Sullivan, Neil. (1995) "Pericles and Protagoras". Greece & Rome, Vol. 42 (1): 15-23
4. ^ Ibid. p. 263.
5. ^ Plutarch. "Pericles." Lives, p. 36.
6. ^ (80B1 DK). This quotation is recapitulated in Plato's Theaetetus, section 152a. [1] Sextus Empiricus (Adv. math. 7.60) gives a direct quotation, πάντων χρημάτων μέτρον ἐστὶν ἄνθρωπος, τῶν μὲν ὄντων ὡς ἔστιν, τῶν δὲ οὐκ ὄντων ὡς οὐκ ἔστιν. The translation "Man is the measure..." has been familiar in English since before the rise of gender-neutral language; in Greek, Protagoras makes a general statement, not about men, but about human beings (his word is anthrōpos).
7. ^ See e.g. John Wild, "On the Nature and Aims of Phenomenology," Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 3 (1942), p. 88: "Phenomenalism is as old as Protagoras."
8. ^ The Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy - Protagoras (c. 490 - c. 420 BCE), Accessed: October 6, 2008. "While the pious might wish to look to the gods to provide absolute moral guidance in the relativistic universe of the Sophistic Enlightenment, that certainty also was cast into doubt by philosophic and sophistic thinkers, who pointed out the absurdity and immorality of the conventional epic accounts of the gods. Protagoras' prose treatise about the gods began "Concerning the gods, I have no means of knowing whether they exist or not or of what sort they may be. Many things prevent knowledge including the obscurity of the subject and the brevity of human life."
9. ^ Cicero, de Natura Deorum, 1.23.6
10. ^ John Burnet, "Greek Philosophy: From Thales to Plato", 1914

v • d • e Pre-Socratic philosophers Milesian school Thales · Anaximander · Anaximenes Pythagoreanism Pythagoras · Alcmaeon · Hippasus · Philolaus · Archytas Ephesian school Heraclitus Eleatic school Xenophanes · Parmenides · Zeno of Elea · Melissus Pluralist school Anaxagoras · Archelaus · Empedocles Atomist school Leucippus · Democritus Sophism Protagoras · Gorgias · Prodicus · Hippias Others Pherecydes · Hippo · Diogenes of Apollonia

v • d • e Ancient Greece topics Timeline Cycladic civilization · Minoan civilization · Mycenaean civilization · Greek Dark Ages · Archaic period · Classical Greece · Hellenistic Greece · Roman Greece Geography Aegean Sea · Hellespont · Macedonia · Sparta · Athens · Corinth · Thebes · Thermopylae · Antioch · Alexandria · Pergamon · Miletus · Ephesus · Delphi · Delos  · Olympia · Troy · Rhodes · Crete · Peloponnesus · Epirus · Cyprus Life Agriculture · Cuisine · Democracy · Economy · Education · Law · Medicine · Pederasty · Prostitution · Religion · Slavery · Technology · Olympic Games  · Warfare  · Wine People Philosophers Anaxagoras · Anaximander · Anaximenes · Antisthenes · Aristotle · Democritus · Diogenes of Sinope · Epicurus · Empedocles · Heraclitus · Leucippus · Gorgias · Parmenides · Plato · Protagoras · Pythagoras · Socrates · Thales · Zeno Authors Aeschylus · Aesop · Aristophanes · Euripides · Herodotus · Hesiod · Homer · Lucian · Menander · Pindar · Plutarch · Polybius · Sappho · Sophocles · Theognis of Megara · Thucydides · Xenophon Others Alexander the Great · Lycurgus · Leonidas · Alcibiades · Demosthenes · Pericles · Solon · Themistocles · Archimedes · Euclid · Hippocrates · Aspasia · Milo of Croton Buildings Parthenon · Temple of Artemis · Acropolis · Ancient Agora · Temple of Zeus at Olympia · Temple of Hephaestus · Samothrace temple complex Arts Architecture · Coinage · Literature · Music · Pottery · Sculpture · Theatre Language Proto-Greek · Mycenaean  · Homeric · Dialects (Aeolic • Arcadocypriot • Attic • Doric • Ionic • Locrian • Macedonian • Pamphylian) · Koine

Wikiquote has a collection of quotations related to: Protagoras

This entry is from Wikipedia, the leading user-contributed encyclopedia. It may not have been reviewed by professional editors (see full disclaimer)