>>>>The intellectual movement known as the Sophists would fundamentally challenge Greek
traditional morality. One way they did so was to raise the question of what about our
culture and its moral standards is simply conventional, and what is natural? And it's
a provocative question in any age. The important of the Sophists, indeed, the towering figure
of the Sophists was a teacher named Protagoras. Protagoras came to Athens and indeed, he's
associated with the milieu of the greatest of all the Athenian democratic leaders, Pericles.
And it's telling that in some sense Protagoras is part of the intellectual atmosphere of
the Athenian democracy in its greatest age and in its age of greatest democracy, it's
most radically democratic moments. Protagoras is well known to history, but its unfortunate
that almost all of his writings and sayings are lost. Indeed our most extensive portrait
of Protagoras is preserved in a dialogue written by Plato, the student of Socrates who's our
most important Athenian source for the teachings of Socrates. Now Plato in his "Dialogues"
often portrays Socrates intellectually sparing with Athenian leaders and sometimes with famous
Athenians Sophists. And usually this is the equivalent of Socrates treating the Sophists
as a punching bag. But it's a measure of even Plato's respect for Protagoras that in the
"Dialogue" the conversation between Protagoras and Socrates, that Protagoras comes off as
quite impressive, as intellectually respectable. He was the greatest of the Sophist philosophers.
And we have two quotations from Protagoras that are extremely revealing, that tell us
something about what his thought must have been like. One of these quotations says: "About
the gods I can know nothing, because of the obscurity of the subject and the brevity of
human life." It's a powerful statement. Protagoras says, "I can know nothing about the gods"
into a highly traditional world of Greek polytheism, Protagoras and presumably other Sophists come
denying the possibility of religious knowledge. And religious skepticism is one of the foundations
of the Sophistic challenge. The other famous quote of Protagoras that preserves for us
some of his own words is an even more well known quotation. He says: "Man is the measure
of all things." It's a profound statement. Think of it, what it means. "Man is the measure
of all things." It's a claim that seems in some sense relativist, that we can have access
to know transcendent orders, no knowledge of the way things are beyond our own perceptions
of them. And we can have no measure of what is good that doesn't start and end with man,
with humans as the measure of all things. And so we see in the ideas of Protagoras,
even in these very insufficient fragments of what he once taught, that the Sophist challenge
is fundamentally a challenge to knowledge. Especially traditional religious knowledge
that says we can't know about the gods, that we don't have the grounds to justify our belief
about the gods, and to question traditional morality. Question the idea that there could
be a transcendent, objective, natural morality saying instead that humans, that man alone
is the measure of morality. These are profoundly unsettling claims in a traditional society.
And they would unsettle, they would be so provocative that they would evoke the philosophies
of Plato and Aristotle in consequence as an effort to try and find justifications for
morality, to try and find a foundation for justice.