Showing papers on "Pyrrhonism published in 1976"

Protagoras and Self-Refutation in Later Greek Philosophy

Abstract: If a philosophical argument is worth attention, so is its history. Traces it has left in the thought of philosophers who have concerned themselves with it have the historical import they do in part because they reveal aspects, often unexpected ones, of the argument's philosophical interest and significance. Such is the case, at any rate, with the argument I want to investigate here. This is an argument directed against Protagoras, the most famous of the Greek sophists of the fifth century B.C., claiming that his doctrine that man is the measure of all things is self-refuting. Jt is an argument which had a long history. The most familiar version occurs in Plato's Theaetetus (17 lab), where it has an important part to play in refuting the extreme empiricist epistemology which the dialogue elaborates out of a definition of knowledge as perception. But already before Plato Democritus had used the argument,' and in his hands it no doubt played some part in securing the epistemological foundations of atomism. After Plato the argument appears in Book Gamma of Aristotle's Metaphysics (1008a28-30, 1012b13-18; cp. K.1063b30-35) in connection with Aristotle's defense of the law of contradiction. It then turns up again in the writings of Sextus Empiricus as part of the Skeptic philosophy's elaborately systematic refutation of all dogmatisms. This last context is the one I shall be considering here. Sextus was the leading Skeptic philosopher of his time (circa 200 A.D.) and his surviving works, Outlines of Pyrrhonism (abbreviated PH from the Greek title) and Against the Mathematicians (abbreviated M), are full of information about the controversies that took place between and within the philosophical movements which grew up in