Everand Logo

Welcome to Everand!

  • Discover millions of ebooks, audiobooks, and so much more with a free trial

    Only $11.99/month after trial. Cancel anytime.

    Unavailable
    Protagoras
    Unavailable
    Protagoras
    Unavailable
    Protagoras
    Ebook129 pages1 hour

    Protagoras

    By Plato

    3.5/5

    ()

    Currently unavailable

    Currently unavailable

    Listen to the audiobook instead

    About this ebook

    Trajectory presents classics of world literature with 21st century features! Our original-text editions include the following visual enhancements to foster a deeper understanding of the work: Word Clouds at the start of each chapter highlight important words. Word, sentence, paragraph counts, and reading time help readers and teachers determine chapter complexity. Co-occurrence graphs depict character-to-character interactions as well character to place interactions. Sentiment indexes identify positive and negative trends in mood within each chapter. Frequency graphs help display the impact this book has had on popular culture since its original date of publication. Use Trajectory analytics to deepen comprehension, to provide a focus for discussions and writing assignments, and to engage new readers with some of the greatest stories ever told.

    "Protagoras" is a discussion by Plato between Protagoras, a sophist, and Socrates.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherTrajectory, Inc.
    Release dateOct 1, 2014
    ISBN9781632097903
    Author

    Plato

    Plato, one of the most renowned ancient Greek philosophers, was born in 427 B.C. to an aristocratic and wealthy family, which played a prominent part in Athenian politics. Plato in conjunction his teacher, Socrates, and his pupil, Aristotle helped to lay the foundations of Western philosophy and culture. While primarily influenced by Socrates, Plato’s work was also affected by the philosophies of Heraclitus, Parmenides, and the Pythagoreans. Under the guidance of Socrates, Plato devoted himself to the pursuit of wisdom and upon Socrates’ death, joined a group of the Socratic disciples gathered at Megara. Later he travelled in Egypt, Magna Graecia, and Sicily. He returned to Athens and founded a school, known as the Academy, which seems to have been his home base for the remainder of his life. While thirty-five dialogues and thirteen letters have traditionally been ascribed to Plato, modern scholarship doubts the authenticity of some of them. His early dialogues are also known as the Socratic dialogues and include Apology, Crito, Euthyphro, and Protagoras. He followed these with his transitional dialogues: Gorgias, Meno , and Euthydemus . The Symposium and the Republic are considered the centerpieces of Plato's middle period and are considered some of his most revered work, and other middle dialogues include Phaedo, Phaedrus, and Theaetetus. Plato’s Laws is the best known dialogues of his late period. Plato died in 347 B.C.

    Read more from Plato

    Related to Protagoras

    Related ebooks

    Classics For You

    View More
    View More

    Related podcast episodes

    Related articles

    • Article

      Rebel Greek Philosophers

      Mar 23, 2023

      Rebel Greek Philosophers
      6 min read

    • Article

      Making Athens Great Again

      Mar 11, 2017

      Making Athens Great Again
      13 min read

    • Article

      The Lost Art of Not Knowing Something

      Feb 10, 2022

      I'd posit that there is a bit of Larry David in Socrates. They both puncture hypocrisy, force us to question our own moral platitudes, and deign that we must defend our presuppositions, even if doing so seems rude. The post The Lost Art of Not Knowin

      13 min read

    • Article

      Down To The Piraeus

      Aug 22, 2022

      Down To The Piraeus
      6 min read

    • Article

      Plato

      Nov 3, 2022

      Plato
      6 min read

    • Article

      Is Nothing Sacred? Aristophanes’s The Clouds and Moral Taboos

      Nov 1, 2020

      On my way to an evening class, my eye caught an interesting poster on the hall bulletin board. In its most recent efforts to rehabilitate my retrograde moral sensibility, Fordham University advertised that it would now provide full vegan menus to the

      26 min read

    • Article

      On The Beauty Of Math

      Jun 27, 2019

      On The Beauty Of Math
      6 min read

    • Article

      Harnessing Ancient Sensitivity

      Dec 1, 2022

      Adventures in 40,000 Years of Consciousness Charles Foster Profile Books 2022 Pb, 400pp, £10.99, ISBN 9781788167185 Charles Foster’s first best-seller – Being a Beast (2016), widely praised as a “strange masterpiece” – had a premise that was hard to

      11 min read

    • Article

      8 Podcast podcast Episodes About Ancient Greece

      Nov 23, 2023

      From the exploits of Agamemnon and Achilles to the alluring beauty of Helen of Sparta, the story of the Trojan War still fascinates people today. But was it based on actual events, or merely a tale cooked up by Homer? In this episode from 2022, Profe

      1 min read

    • Article

      Book Reviews

      Oct 19, 2021

      By Amber Gartrell ISBN: 978-1108477550 Cambridge University Press (2021) – $99.99 www.cambridge.org Once upon a time there were two brothers. The Greeks knew them as the Dioskouroi, the Romans as the Dioscuri. Sons of Leda, queen of Sparta, they had

      5 min read

    • Article

      A Compendium Of Cryptids

      Mar 21, 2024

      A Compendium Of Cryptids
      11 min read

    • Article

      A Room For The Ages

      Jun 1, 2023

      On an early spring day in March, I drove 800 miles, from Brooklyn to Atlanta, to see a room I knew I could never enter. In the basement of Oglethorpe University's Phoebe Hearst Hall lies a locked room—20 feet long, 10 feet wide and 10 feet high—that'

      5 min read

    • Article

      The END of LITERATURE

      Sep 4, 2018

      LITERATURE’S MAINSTREAM is not a river that flows between fixed banks, but one that must be cut, and it is the experimental writer who, avoiding the backwaters of the often more lucrative and momentarily celebrated conventional writing, can be found

      7 min read

    • Article

      Dark Matter Is in Our DNA

      Mar 16, 2018

      Dark Matter Is in Our DNA
      6 min read

    • Article

      Why Mathematicians Should Stop Naming Things After Each Other

      Sep 2, 2020

      Any student of modern math must know what it feels like to drown in a well of telescoping terminology. For a high-profile example, let’s take the Calabi-Yau manifold, made famous by string theory. A Calabi-Yau manifold is a compact, complex Kähler ma

      6 min read

    • Article

      Deconstructing The Decolonisers

      Jul 27, 2023

      TO DECOLONISE THE CURRICULUM or not to decolonise the curriculum, that is the question. In his latest book, Against Decolonisation: Campus Culture Wars and the Decline of the West, Doug Stokes turns his analytical eye for international affairs inward

      4 min read

    • Article

      Seeing The Big Picture

      May 26, 2022

      IBN KHALDUN (1332-1406) WAS A PIONEERING Arab scholar and one of the most important historians of the Middle Ages. He is best known for his three-volume masterwork the Muqaddimah, written in 1377, which integrated politics, sociology, economics, demo

      7 min read

    • Article

      Life Versus Learning: A Battle Of The Titans

      Nov 30, 2023

      TWO VOLUMES SIT ON MY DESK: ONE, thick and weighty, features a marble bust of Plato on the cover. The other, slimmer, volume bears the image of Diogenes in his amphora surrounded by dogs. The contrast between the two contemporaries and rivals shines

      4 min read

    • Article

      We Are All Ancient Mapmakers

      Jan 30, 2020

      In the first half of the sixth century B.C., a Greek man named Anaximander, born in Turkey, sketched the world in a way no one had previously thought to do. It featured a circle, divided into three equal parts. He labeled those parts Europe, Asia, an

      9 min read

    Reviews for Protagoras

    3.5/5

    33 ratings4 reviews

    What did you think?

    Tap to rate

    Review must be at least 10 words

    • 5/5
      I twice tried to read the Lombardo Bell translation and failed, so obtained this one. It's clear and naturalistic, just like Plato should be, with perhaps a little of that zing and pzazz of the best translations. It also has excellent notes. Don't be put off by the rather dense introduction - it's designed to guide further thought once you've read the dialogue.
    • 4/5
      This I feel is one of Plato's later dialogues, though it is still very Socratic in form. It is believed that the main part of the dialogue (it is not really a dialogue in that it seems to be more like a retelling of an earlier event, an event which most likely occurred before Plato was born, than a first hand account of a discussion). However, I also note that there is no reference to the theory of Forms, so it appears that this particular work is probably more Socratic than Platonic.As I have mentioned, the discussion (for want of a better word) is set about fifty years (or more) before the dialogue (for want of a better word) was published. At the time, Athens was at the height of her power, and the thirty year long Peloponesian War had yet to begin. A famous philosopher, named Protagoras, who was aged around 65 at the time (according to the translator of the version that I read) was visiting Athens, and one of Socrates' friends (Socrates was aged around 35 at the time, so had yet to become the Socrates that we all know and love) wanted to go and give money to this guy to become a student. Hearing this, and obviously a little disturbed about the whole thing, Socrates decides to go with his friend to meet Protagoras (Protagoras was actually quite famous at the time, so it wasn't as if some unknown had appeared in Athens and started sprouting a lot of rubbish).One thing I found interesting was when we first meet Protagoras. The discussion between Socrates and his friend at first sounded as if his friend may have been seduced into joining some sort of cult. Basically give this guy money and he will teach you how to be a good and moral person. Remember, Socrates actually did this for free because he did not believe that one should have to pay to be taught how to be a good and moral person. This was not like learning how to argue (rhetoric), as the text suggests, but morality. Anyway, when we first meet Protagoras, we see him with a group of Athenians clustered around him listening to him intently, and a larger group of followers eagerly taging along behind (I guess they had already paid their money). To me, Protagoras really does sound like some sort of Jim Jones.Anyway, I should actually talk about the discussion between Socrates and Protagoras, and it is the question of whether one can be taught morality. Protagoras says that yes it can, but of course he is going to take that line because he is making money out of teaching people morality. Socrates does not necessarily take the opposite view (he never does) but rather tries to poke holes in Protagoras' argument. In a sense Socrates takes the line that experience cannot be taught, and morality is something that is learnt through experience. As we interact with people we learn what upsets them and what does not upset them, and we tend to drift towards not wanting to upset them. In a way, it goes back to the basic Socratic principle of nobody does wrong willingly (which I sort of don't agree with, but if we accept that people's sense of morality is subjective as opposed to objective, then that is the case).Now, there are some interesting things that do come out of this dialogue. Protagoras tells a story of two demi-gods, Thinxahead and Thinxtolate, who are given the takes of designing and creating life on Earth. Thinxtolate decides to take it all on himself, and hands out all of these gifts to the animals to allow them to survive, but when he gets to humanity, all of the gifts have run out, so there is nothing left for them. However, Thinxahead decides to give humanity the gift of wisdom and intelligence, and to do that, he steals it from the gods. In a way it is similar (but no where near identical to) the Genesis account where humanity is given the breath of life from God, which sets them apart from the animal kingdom.Then there is the idea of cowardice and bravery. Socrates seems to take the position that people are cowards due to ignorance: cowardice is the fear of the unknown. People are cowards because they are ignorant of the action (and I must agree with that, because I have known cowards that are cowards because they simply accept that they can't do something because they do not believe they can do it, which is ignorance), however bravery is being able to respect what is known. I don't think Socrates meant that bravery is taking on a fully armed Spartan soldier with a straw hat, that's not brave, that's stupid. As a side note, he suggests that Spartans are wiser than the Athenians because of their ability to make piffy one liners (much like many of Arnold Swartzenegger's characters, which I would hardly call wise).The conclusion is that there is no real conclusion (as happens with many of Plato's dialogues, because he wants us to work it out for ourselves rather than spoon feeding us). Protagoras simply says that he is sick of talking to Socrates and will continue the discussion later (but also praises Socrates on his ability to argue and says he will one day become a great philosopher, no doubt something added by Plato), and Socrates simply says that it is getting late, he has things that he has to do, and pretty much goes home.
    • 5/5
      A great Plato dialogue, both from literary and philosophic point of views. Vivid characters in a true duel of ideas, from one side Socrate and from the other side, Protagoras, the great sophist master. The dispute is thrilling, punctuated by irony and with a somewhat surprising end. Interesting is that the sophist is not presented as a plain deceiver and it doesn't seem to be the purpose of the dialogue to show that. Instead, it seems the whole idea is to present the power of the dialectical method as way to find knowlegue, independent on individual opinions. As such it makes philsophy a superior approach as the traditional sophist one.
    • 3/5
      The famed Greek mathematician, Plato, and Socrates.