Search

This paper discusses Protagoras' account of how political communities come to be in Plato's Protagoras. The paper argues against recent readings of Protagoras' culture story that attempt to assimilate it to Aristotle's account by claiming that the text prefigures the Aristotelian thesis that human beings are political animals by nature. Instead, the paper suggests that Protagoras' account is part of a different tradition of political thinking, political conventionalism, that is among others associated with Democritus and Epicurus and his followers and that is known as social contract theory in one of its most fully developed forms. Key characteristics of this tradition are an emphasis on the lack of security in the original condition of humankind and human weakness as the primary reason why human beings decided to live together in communities. However, while Protagoras' account clearly prefigures a kind of political conventionalism, the paper also points out that this account lacks an important feature of social contract theory, namely, agreements as the means by which humankind transitioned from the original condition to life in communities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A literary criticism of the book "Protagoras" by Plato is presented. Topics discussed include the pleasant and good aspects of hedonism, the critical scenes, philosophical commitments, the concept of Sophistry, an overview of the life of Socrates, and the association between hedonistic and sophist values.

The article focuses on the interpretation of Simonide's song in Plato's Protagoras. It clearly states the implication of the song in the dialogue of comically misleading exposition. The dialogue's evidence is weaker and more ambiguous than what many people believed and it does not rule out the new text. It also presents an explanation of the mysterious failure to understand the Simonides. Ethical concept of goodness is taken into account. Misleading interpretations of the wordings of the song are also described by the author.

This article focuses on Greek historian Protagoras' Homeric allusion as a satirical weapon. This article sketches two different types of Homeric allusion in the Protagoras, which are referred as "doctrinal allusion" and "malicious mythology." Finally, The article argues that Greek scholar Socrates' Iliadic quotation, far from being coincidental, falls under both types and reveals an unnoticed satirical vein on another Greek scholar Plato's part. Protagoras was a renowned critic of Homer, and his exegesis was not limited, as has often been wrongly stated, to the "correctness" of single words. On the contrary, Protagoras is one of the few ancient critics who is concerned with problems of structure and internal consistency as well.