Greece, c. 490–420 BCE
Protagoras
Pre-Socratic Sophist who taught rhetoric in Athens. Famous for the dictum, 'Man is the measure of all things.'
Protagoras in 1 line
Every Protagoras passage in thinkr's library, with the theme each one speaks to.
“Man is the measure of all things.”
Where Protagoras lands on a hard choice
Quotation is the easy part. The harder test is what a position does when it meets a situation where every option costs something.
You can be widely liked or clearly respected, not both here.
You are testing whether the trade-off is real before paying it. The danger is using nuance to avoid ever standing anywhere.
You are the only person who seems to see the problem.
You are taking the disagreement of others as data rather than obstacle. The danger is talking yourself out of something you actually saw.
Reading Protagoras today
Protagoras wrote in c. 490–420 BCE, from Greece — a world with different assumptions about authority, death and what a life is for. That distance is useful rather than a problem: it is what lets the ideas cut against assumptions you did not know you were making.
In thinkr, Protagoras is one of 44 thinkers you can put a real question to, and the answers come back in that thinker's own voice and commitments rather than as a neutral summary. The 1 passage above is what the app draws on.
Working at roughly the same time
- Aristotle — Greece, 384–322 BCE
- Confucius — China, 551–479 BCE
- Heraclitus — Ephesus, c. 535–475 BCE
- Plato — Athens, c. 428–348 BCE
- Pythagoras — Samos & Croton, c. 570–495 BCE
- Socrates — Athens, c. 470–399 BCE
Argues the same cases
Confucius, David Hume, Epictetus, Hannah Arendt, Bertrand Russell, Mahatma Gandhi take positions on the same dilemmas as Protagoras, which is usually where the disagreements become concrete.