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The intensely human culture of newly literate Ionia spread into every field of intellectual endeavor. Though it was obviously anti-religious, serious opposition to it took nearly a century to develop. Ionian thought came to Athens later than to Italy. It was introduced by Anaxagoras of Clazomenae and by members of a new “profession,” the Sophists –itinerant lecturers and tutors. The most famous of these was Protagoras, the first Relativist and explicit agnostic. Socrates, a native Athenian, started out as a friend of the scientific side of Pythagoreanism. As such he was caricatured by the comic poet Aristophanes; and as such he was condemned and put to death for “impiety.” But by that time he had undergone a conversion from science to the moral and religious interests also associated with the Brotherhood.

This essay reinterprets Berkeley’s idealism as partially motivated by a need to overcome the Agrippan mode of relativity pressed by Pyrrhonists. It compares Berkeley’s solution to that of Protagoras as presented in Plato’s Theaetetus, and argues that Berkeley needed to depend on reason — intuition or demonstration — to avoid skepticism. In this interpretation, Berkeley is closer to the rationalist tradition than usually recognized.

This chapter shows that Plato's view of Hesiod is shaped not only by a critical tradition that pairs him with Homer, but also by sophistic appropriations of a more specific kind. Prodicus in particular, with his concern for the ‘correctness of names’, recognized Hesiod as an intellectual ancestor. More generally, Hesiod could be appropriated to represent particular philosophical interests, including etymology and epistemological atomism. As such, he became a convenient target for Plato's attacks on those approaches.

This chapter examines Protagoras in the context of Plato's dialogue the Protagoras, and also in the larger context of the sophistic age. More specifically, it argues that Protagoras held that values, like truths, can be diverse and conflicting. The chapter explores each section of the dialogue in turn by illustrating the ways in which Protagoras' views, as expounded by Plato, can further be considered pluralist. So too, it highlights the sophistic issues which are brought to light and how Protagorean pluralism is representative of broader fifth‐century trends of thinking. The analysis of the Great Speech, the unity of virtues, and the metrikē technē (measuring craft) are particularly important in drawing attention to the parallels between modern pluralism and Protagoras' position.

Except for Plutarch, the authors discussed in this book all lived at the same time as Pericles, or within a generation of his death. Many were his coevals and in a position either to have been personally acquainted with him or to have known people who were. Some, such as Anaxagoras, Protagoras, and Sophocles, were probably his good friends. The historian Thucydides also doubtless knew him personally and saw him on the street and in the assembly, but, inasmuch as he was at least thirty years younger than Pericles, it is doubtful that Pericles had any close association with him. Herodotus might have composed much of his work prior to Pericles' death and might have expected that Pericles would be aware of what he wrote. Within a century of his death, Pericles has become the exemplar of the greatness of Athens in its heyday and remains so to the present day. The golden age of Athens is referred to as “Periclean Athens” or “Athens in the age of Pericles.”

This chapter discusses extracts from the Apocryphal book of Jubilees, Herodotus' Histories, and Plato's Protagoras. It explores the idea that myths and stories serve to construct one's understanding of nature, appealing to what appear to be value-free facts, but telling a story that attaches significance to those facts as morally relevant or irrelevant considerations. Nature appears as provident and wise, or as improvident and hostile. The portrayal generates in the reader either a sense of fellow-feeling and care for the environment, or a sense of justified aggression. Narrative can be used to manipulate the reader's perception of his/her place in the world, and of the value and purpose of moral precepts.

This chapter explains the non-subjective character of thought, describing in new terms what it means for thought to let beings be. It means to yield to Being in its negativity. In the essay “The Time of World-as-Picture”, there are passages where the author contrasts the Cartesian version of presentative thought with what he understands to be Greek νοε̃ιν. Heidegger argues that when beings emerge into presence in any given instance, the domain of non-concealment is limited, for the emergence is finite. Thus the domain of disclosure has measure. It is what separates what comes to presence from what does not. For Protagoras, the fundamental attitude is one of acceptance, of opening himself unto the self-revelation of beings in their Being.

Protagoras of Abdera, the most famous sophist of the age, visited Athens on several occasions, probably for extended periods of time. He came once about 443 B.C. in preparation for creating a law code for the settlement at Thurii. Pericles almost certainly picked him for the task. Plato in his Protagoras records another visit about 432. In that dialogue he depicts Pericles' sons, Xanthippus and Paralus, as present at his discourse, which takes place at the home of Callias, their half brother on their mother's side. Protagoras, who was born about 490 and died about 420, was just slightly younger than Pericles and probably knew him very well. Despite Protagoras's importance, almost nothing of his writings has survived. It is intriguing, then, for understanding the relationship between Pericles and Protagoras, that the one substantial fragment that remains of his writings expresses his admiration for Pericles' behavior in the face of the deaths of his sons from the onslaught of the plague in the summer of 430.

In a celebrated passage of Plato’s Protagoras (351b–58e) Socrates argues that it is impossible for us to do things that we know are better left undone. His claim, roughly put, is that we are capable of acting incorrectly only if and only when we fail to recognize that we are acting incorrectly. Of all the counterintuitive arguments in the so-called Socratic dialogues, this one is probably the most famous. Historians have extensively examined its structure, its motivation, and its place within the broader sweep of Socratic and Platonic moral psychology. As a result of this, perhaps, many contemporary philosophers of action now feel compelled to mention it, if not to scrutinize it, when addressing themselves to the general topic of practical irrationality. But in recent years the historians and the philosophers have begun to diverge in their assessments of the argument’s intrinsic merit. While most of the philosophers have come to agree that it is implausible, either in whole or in part, many of the historians have defended it against this very charge, and have implied that the argument’s detractors are, as a rule, either exegetically misguided or philosophically shallow. Sadly, these two camps seem to have little if any sustained interaction with each other. So it is hardly surprising to find, in the recent literature on the subject, an unresolved and (largely) unengaged dispute between the majority of contemporary philosophers, on the one hand, and a cadre of devoted historians on the other. The purpose of this chapter is to get the dispute back on track, by providing both parties with a reliable guide to the issues that continue to divide them.

Pyrrho's philosophical affiliations and antecedents are far from clear and a bewildering variety of claims has been made on the topic, in both ancient and modern times. In the ancient period, these frequently take the form of locating Pyrrho in a certain ‘succession’ of philosophers — that is, a chronological sequence of philosophers, each member of which is alleged to have been the teacher of the next member. Such ‘succession’ stories deserve consideration. More clearly worthy of serious attention are the verdicts on other philosophers offered by Timon in his poem Silloi, ‘Lampoons’. This chapter casts doubt on a number of such claims of influence — claims that have received a large measure of acceptance in the literature on Pyrrho. It discusses the indeterminacy thesis, Pyrrho's predecessors such as Plato and Aristotle, Xenophanes, Protagoras, Democritus, Anaxarchus, and the megarians and the Indians.

This chapter presents an outline of Socrates' view of moral psychology as presented in Plato's Protagoras. The chapter concerns with the critical examination of some classical and modern views of reasons for action and motivation for action which tend, sometimes themselves to assimilate weakness to recklessness or compulsion. It focuses on Socratic account of knowledge and pleasure in the production of action, and his explanation of weakness of will. It then examines John McDowell's analysis of moral knowledge and moral motivation. A close evaluation of the shortcomings of the Socratic accounts, which equate virtue with knowledge, tends to push towards Humean account of the explanation of action. The chapter concludes that a search for a looser connection at a lower cost to common sense.

This chapter discusses the contradiction in the limits of cognition, one of the four limits of thought. Cognition is about relationships that arise between agents and the world that they cognise, such as knowledge, truth, and rational belief. It determines the contradictions at the limit of cognition with a thesis called the Cognition Scheme. It also analyses the issue of relativism and scepticism through the views and works of philosophers Protagoras and Sextus Empiricus.

Quoting from the philosophical idea of Protagoras that ‘Man is the measure of all things’, this chapter discusses how the philosopher’s maxim disagrees with the author’s views on social relativism. Two formulations of social dependence of values are presented based on the special and general aspects. Sustaining practices are identified as well, apart from showing examples and explanations of dependence without reduction or conventionalism and other justifying considerations. Although applicable to cultural values, the scope and limitations of special dependence thesis are pointed out and it is also emphasised that the values giving a meaning and a purpose to life are socially dependent. Outlined in this chapter is the motivation to view social dependence of values as free from relativism.