Talk:Protagoras

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Contents 1 Source for quotation from Protagoras? 2 Protagoras a feminist?? 3 The best use or meaning 4 subjectivity - apropo? 5 Protagoras and Continental Philosophy 6 Rhetoric, Orthoepeia, etc.: Where to put the emphasis? 7 WikiProject class rating

[edit] Source for quotation from Protagoras?

"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." Does anybody know the source for this quotation? —The preceding unsigned comment was added by IuvenisJacobus (talk • contribs) .

I've added the reference to the Diels-Kranz edition (80B4 DK). (The source is Eusebius, Praeparatio Evangelica 14.3 and Diogenes Laertius 9.51.) Wareh 17:54, 10 September 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Protagoras a feminist??

The author of this article claims the word man here is generic for human being. This is extremely unlikely considering the times. Scholars generally believe that, until at least the 19th if not the 20th century, there were few intellectual writers who considered woman to be equal with men in rationality and subsequently personhood. Thus, Protagoras would have specifically been talking about men. Many people are still working on understanding how woman were viewed in ancient times. (Not that I agree, just to point out the fact)—The preceding unsigned comment was added by 69.162.197.96 (talk • contribs) .

Protagoras uses the word anthropos; this does in fact mean "human being" and has no reference to sex. Let's leave aside the issue of what Protagoras' attitudes towards women (I certainly don't think the article should claim he was a feminist based on the fact that he made claims on the general level abt. human nature!) may have been; the fact is that here, literally, he makes a statement that he generalizes to human beings. Wareh 17:57, 10 September 2006 (UTC)

I've rewritten to clarify this point (and included the Greek in a footnote). I've kept the content the same but tried to avoid a couple of misleading points. Protagoras wrote in Greek, not English, so it was absurd to say "Protagoras uses the word man to mean...," when in fact he never used a word that refers to men (in the contemporary gender-specific sense) in the first place. Likewise, I tried to use more cautious language so that we're told that Protagoras as some kind of committed relativist is a view we get through Plato's eyes. Wareh 18:18, 10 September 2006 (UTC)

I disagree that anthropos has no reference to sex. It's true it can mean "human being" and refer to men as well as women, but it is a masculine noun that can be used to describe men alone, and this point needs to be made - as the article says, there are many interpretations of the statement, and we can't preclude the possibility that he is only talking about men. Cantrix 04:12, 25 September 2007 (UTC)

Obviously we cannot preclude any possible things Protagoras may have been thinking, but you're mistaken about what he says in Greek (please check your standard lexicons, etc., and cite the source of this eccentric theory about the word's meaning). The relevant usage of ἄνθρωπος to refer to humankind in general goes back to the beginning of Greek literature (ἣ θέμις ἀνθρώπων πέλει ἀνδρῶν ἠδὲ γυναικῶν, Iliad 9.134) and never changed. The argument from grammatical gender is close to meaningless (but did you know ἄνθρωπος is sometimes feminine?); one may as well try to infer something meaningful from the fact that, "In French l'être humain is masculine and can [logically but not specifically] be used to describe men alone." Wareh 14:54, 25 September 2007 (UTC)

My baby version of Liddell and Scott agrees with you to a point - it cites the primary meaning of ἄνθρωπος as 'mankind', but does support my view that it can describe 'a man', especially when in the singular, or accompanied by an adjective (obviously the latter is not relevant here!), so I think your claim that this meaning is eccentric is a little unfair. At least one scholar (Mary Margaret McCabe), in a review of an article by R. D. McKirahan, Jr. claims that "At least as Plato reports it, Protagoras said 'man', not 'a man'. This... could have been designed to preserve the ambiguity of anthropos... is it general or particular, 'mankind' or 'a man'?" I think it's a little un-encyclopedic not to allow for the possibility that Protagoras does refer to an individual man, but I guess that I am also somewhat convinced by your arguments. I'd be happy with just changing the footnote to say "...Protagoras 'probably' makes a general statement..." - this is a fairly minor change, but still makes a difference, I think. Is this ok with you? Cantrix 12:35, 27 September 2007 (UTC)

It's not ok with me, because it still contains a misunderstanding of the Greek, of the lexicon, and of what those scholars are talking about. When you learn Greek better, you will not be tempted to confuse the usage in this passage with the colloquial usages given as I.5-7 in the LSJ article (it's applying that meaning to this passage that I meant to call eccentric, and I guarantee you will find no scholar writing in support of it). The scholarly remarks you have quoted are using the English word "man" in its meaning "human being" or "humankind"; your quote makes it quite clear that, in that discussion, "man" vs. "a man" is being discussed, not "male" vs. "human." Of course, this is a traditional English usage (though no longer in fashion and liable to cause confusion, as here), which is why Protagoras' saying has become famous in English as "Man is the measure." Wareh 13:22, 27 September 2007 (UTC)

Ok. I'm still not totally sure I agree that I'll never find a good scholar who clearly thinks some crazy things about Protagoras, but until I do... :P Cantrix 14:05, 27 September 2007 (UTC)

[edit] The best use or meaning

"Man is the measure of all things, of those that are that they are, and of those that are not that they are not."

The above quote may better be said abductively:

"Man is the measure of all things, of those that are what they are, and of those that are not what they are not."

The former "those" may be a set of things at issue or on the foreground, while the latter its complement on the background. The two complementary sets are analogous to yin and yang of Taoism, and arguably to the actual and apparent or Implicate and Explicate Order in David Bohm's Wholeness and Implicate Order (1980).

The main proposition may mean such that it is man rather than god who is to measure, nominate, or even dominate all things, whether on the foreground or background in the universe, "unfolded" or "folded" in Bohm's "wholeness." This interpretation well fits Protagoras' agnosticism, and Taoist and Buddhist atheism. --KYPark 03:44, 20 Mar 2005 (UTC)

I think that it bears greater resemblance to the idea articulated by Kant that when man makes use of scientific theories, he is not discovering rules that exist innately, but rather, imposing order on the universe. --Amargo Scribe 19:14, 21 August 2005 (UTC)

[edit] subjectivity - apropo?

It is generally thought to be promoting relativism. It was his teachings that spurred later philosophers such as Plato to search for objective, transcendent guidelines to underly moral behavior, and the importance of subjectivity is an important theme in modern philosophy. unless their is a general concensus that subjectivity is a synonym with relativism, (which there is not) the sentence doesn't appear to make much sense. (20040302 08:41, 30 August 2005 (UTC)). This last statement only proves how easily Protagoras is misunderstood, and how the ideas of excellence and quality are unfairly relegated to subjectivism, as distorted by dualistic thinking. First is the experience... then the rational mind looks for explanations (here lies the subjectivity, not before).

Agreed. subjectivism & relativism are not the same, though I think "objective" here can be meant in two senses, one meaning the "opposite" of relativism rather than the traditional 'object/subject' relation/relativity. This doesn't however excuse the confusion of retorting to Plato's objectivism as against subjectivity in this case, which is affirming the consequent. Nagelfar (talk) 03:59, 25 March 2008 (UTC)

[edit] Protagoras and Continental Philosophy

A section on Protagoras and late twentieth-century (French) philosophy is needed. From Lyotard's Postmodern Condition. (Quote and reference needed.) the statement that man is the measure of all thngs as skepticism about knowledge rather than moral relativism.

[edit] Rhetoric, Orthoepeia, etc.: Where to put the emphasis?

I've rewritten the general overview of what Protagoras was interested in, so let me add a brief justification here. First, the previous content was all-too-obviously written by someone who depended heavily on the article at the Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy, and this led to some misleading emphases. Orthoepeia, though listed as one of three main points at the IEP, is not a defining or predominant part of our overall impression of P. from all the primary sources. Also, the previous text made P. sound like a very general caricature of a sophist (basically a rhetoric or law-court-tricks professor), whereas it's his broader range of theoretical interests (from syntax to poetry) that makes him distinctive and important in the history of philosophy. Wareh 18:33, 10 September 2006 (UTC)

[edit] WikiProject class rating

This article was automatically assessed because at least one WikiProject had rated the article as start, and the rating on other projects was brought up to start class. BetacommandBot 04:23, 10 November 2007 (UTC)