Philosopher (480 BC – 415 BC)
One of the most renowned pre-Socratic philosophers and one of the main representatives of the Sophist School of philosophy. Protagoras came from Abdera, the same city-state as Democritus, who served as his teacher. His job, according to his own words was to educate people. Plato, in his homonymous book admits that Protagoras indeed educated people.
Protagoras flourished during the Golden Age of Pericles, a time when philosophy, art and sciences had reached their peak. Protagoras was hired by Pericles as a private tutor of his children and was assigned the drawing up of the laws for the Athenian colony of Thurii in Southern Italy. There he met Herodotus, Hippodamus and Empedocles. His eminence was such that Euripides, a great admirer of Protagoras, had allowed him to give lectures in his house. He eventually made a fortune 10 times larger than that of Pheidias.
Protagoras expressed three main doctrines. The first was that man is the measure of all things. This is the very first phrase of his book Truth. In it, Protagoras lays the foundations of relativism. He writes that man is the only measure that can prove if things that exist truly exist and whether things that do not exist truly do not exist. For Protagoras, truth is relative to the knower; reality is constantly being formed by the relationship between man and the surrounding environment or cosmos and is perceived by man depending on his inner self.
His second doctrine was orthoepeia, the correct use of words. As a great educator and teacher himself, he made great contributions to pedagogic science and laid important foundations of grammar. He divided the three genders, determined the tenses and the moods of verbs. For him, language is an artificial construct made by man as a product of convention. He believed that education should reach the depths of the soul in order to have results. He also believed that teaching required a natural talent and that general education for children was necessary not for acquisition of knowledge but rather for the development of a personality. He accepted the four main divisions of virtue: prudence, phronesis, justice and fortitude. These opinions are expressed in his book Megas Logos.
The third doctrine of Protagoras was agnosticism. Man was not in a position to know whether Gods existed or not as there is no solid proof concerning their existence. His views on agnosticism were documented in On Gods, which was burned in public view by the Athenians after being persecuted and exiled for atheism.
Racial objectivism was another key idea in Protagoras’ philosophy, according to which different races have different points of view than others because people of the same social group have the same customs, traditions, language etc. For example, the same thing could be judged as just by the Persian but unjust by the Greek. Protagoras was a prolific writer. Ancient Greek biographers have attributed a large number of books to him, most of which survive today only by the title of their names. Some of the most notable ones was On the State of Things in the Beginning. In it, Protagoras describes the primitive state of humanity and its necessity to establish civilization. The growth of civilization occurred as a necessity of man to preserve himself and to enjoy a better life.
Protagoras’ works had tremendous influence in the world of philosophy, mainly with the doctrine that man creates his own world and truths based on his subjective view of the world. He was a pioneer in education and rhetoric. Even though he came into conflict with some of Plato’s ideas, he was well respected by him to the point where he wrote a book after his name. Thanks to him, Plato began searching for the transcendent forms, the .theory of ideas. For his radicalism, nevertheless, he was not kindly tolerated by society.
Bibliography
- Pleures, Konstantinos. The persecution of the best elements of society. Athens: Hilektron publications, 2013. Print.
- Pleures, Konstantinos. Greek Philosophers. Athens: Hilektron Publications, 2014. Print.
- Poster, Carol. Protagoras. Internet Encyclopaedia of Philosophy. Iep.utm.edu. Web. Retrieved on November 23, 2016.
- “Protagoras”. Helios New Encyclopaedic Dictionary. Passas, I. Athens, 1946. Print.