Practice question · True or false
Protagoras’ claim that man is the measure of all things is compatible, on its strong reading, with there being one objective fact about how cold the wind is.
Hints
- Consider a wind that seems cold to one person and warm to another.
- On the strong reading it simply IS cold for the one and warm for the other, with no further fact.
Show the answer
False
Why
False, on the strong reading there is no fact about the wind beyond how it strikes each perceiver. Whether Protagoras intended that reading is disputed, but it is the one Plato attacks and the one the phrase has carried ever since.
Practise The Sophists
The app has 3 more questions on this lesson, and keeps your place in the course. Philosophy I is free to start.
More questions on The Sophists
- Why does Plato have a particular motive to distinguish Socrates sharply from the Sophists?
- Sort each arrangement by whether the Sophists would classify it as nomos or physis.
- Which are genuine contributions of the Sophists?
- Match each Sophist or term to what it is associated with.
- Arrange these steps in the reasoning that made the Sophists influential in Athens.
- The Sophists shifted philosophical inquiry from physis (nature) to nomos (human convention). What follows…
- Complete the account of the Sophists’ central distinction.