Plato’s Protagoras: Antinaturalism, Sophistry and the Political Art.

In this essay, I examine Socrates' public encounter with the foremost representative of "sophistic" in the PROTAGORAS, and through an analysis of that encounter develop the outlines of a radical theory of human creative and interpretive activity which, I argue, is associated with the activity of the sophists in Plato's dialogues. A careful reading of Protagoras' "great speech" reveals that Protagoras' teaching on nature is more complex, more philosophically interesting, and a greater challenge to Platonic philosophy than either the broad relativist doctrine Socrates associates with the Protagoras in the THEAETETUS, or the materialist naturalism he attributes to the sophist’s popular defenders. Instead, at the deepest level, Protagoras propounds a radically antinaturalist theory of human creative activity. Protagoras, on this reading, is not merely antinaturalist in the weak sense of claiming that human social life cannot be adequately explained solely in terms of our animal nature; i.e., I am not making the relatively uncontroversial claim that Protagoras is a humanist of some sort. On the contrary, I argue that, on Protagoras' account, human nature is not merely subordinate to convention or culture, but is, in the final analysis, itself an artifact of a kind of poetic activity [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]