Protagoras

Whether the poet knows these things or not, his art as a poet is never seriously criticized on that account.

What fault can one see in Homer's Sing of the Wrath, Goddess, which Protagoras has criticized as being a command where a prayer was meant, since the bid one do or not do he tells us is a command.

Let us pass over this, then, as appertaining to another art and not to that of poetry.

This is a LibriVox recording.

The form and institutions of the state are more clearly drawn out in the laws.

As works of art, the Symposium and the Protagoras are of higher excellence.

But no other dialogue of Plato has the same largeness of view and the same perfection of style.

No other shows an equal knowledge of the world, or contains more of those thoughts which are new as well as old, and not of one age only, but of all.

Man is the measure of all things.

This proverb, attributed to the ancient Greek philosopher Protagoras, suggests that human beings, in all their complexity, are the standard by which everything is judged.

But is this just a self-centered view of the universe? Or does it hold a deeper truth? In the realm of science, this idea resonates with the anthropic principle, which posits that the universe must be compatible with the conscious beings that observe it.

Your human experience, after all, is how the universe perceives itself.

An analogy I could find in history would be, was it in the Credo or was it the Menno? I forget.

Was it in the Protagoras? I was right, actually.

It was the Menno.

It was the Menno.

Aristotle intimates that Democritus obtained his atomic theory from the Pythagorean doctrine of the monad.

Among the Eleatics are also included Protagoras and Anaxarchus.

Socrates, four hundred and sixty-nine to three hundred and ninety-nine BC, the founder of the Socratic sect, being fundamentally a skeptic, did not force his opinions upon others, but through the medium of questionings caused each man to give expression to his own philosophy.

According to Plutarch, Socrates conceived every place as appropriate for reaching in that the whole world was a school of virtue.

4.

Protagoras The first and most famous of the sophists was Protagoras of Abdera.

Born in the year 480 BC, he became a paid teacher at 30, and pursued that calling for a period of 40 years with brilliant success, traversing the whole breadth of the Hellenic world, and if we may judge from what seems to be the typical instance of Athens, exciting immense enthusiasm among the more enlightened classes of Greek society.

Pericles debated moral problems with him, and he was employed to make laws for the Athenian colony of Thurii.

On the occasion of a later visit to the imperial city, public attention was drawn to the fact that Protagoras was a declared agnostic.

A book of his began with the words, As to the gods, I do not know whether they exist or not.

Life is too short for such difficult inquiries.

The author was expelled from Athens, a herald was sent round demanding the surrender of the book from all private individuals who possessed it, and the copies collected were burnt in the marketplace.

At some point, he quotes Homer, but in this case, both the people prompting Hippias and Ion, respectively, have some knowledge, have said something with regard to Homer that gets this discussion going, and I'm really glad that this morning I actually...

I was reviewing the Protagoras and some other, the Gorgias, and other things in this area because these two dialogues, like, if you introduce somebody to Plato with these, this would not be good.

[laughs] They would not know what Plato's, Socrates's view is on anything.

They're both very short, and they kind of establish, I don't know, they're very easy to summarize, I feel.

It's Seth's turn, and I didn't really give a real intro [laughs] anyway.

Well, since Seth didn't jump in, I'll say one more thing.

So I'm glad that this morning I thought about this, you know, unifying knowledge and virtue thing, which is very central to all of, you know, the, if we're gonna analyze what Plato has to say about ethics, this is really key, and we talked about it a lot in our discussion of the Protagoras, which was another, you know, mid-period dialogue around the same time or earlier, a little earlier than The Republic, we think, where, you know, where The Republic we sort of get the, the clearest idea of, you know, what this ruler class, how they would be the best, how they would be in touch with virtue.

But I was being very literal before that, and, like, you know, we're gonna consider the perennial questions of, is it better to knowingly do evil than to unknowingly do evil? And are the poets knowledgeable about the things they talk about, or are they just divinely inspired? Those questions do, which are the literal things that are discussed in these two dialogues, do not sound like they would reverberate through the ages.