29 ideas
| 1553 | No perceptible object is truly straight or curved [Protagoras] |
| Full Idea: No perceptible object is geometrically straight or curved; after all, a circle does not touch a ruler at a point, as Protagoras used to say, in arguing against the geometers. | |
| From: Protagoras (fragments/reports [c.441 BCE], B07), quoted by Aristotle - Metaphysics 998a1 |
| 1549 | Everything that exists consists in being perceived [Protagoras] |
| Full Idea: Everything that exists consists in being perceived. | |
| From: Protagoras (fragments/reports [c.441 BCE]), quoted by Didymus the Blind - Commentary on the Psalms (frags) | |
| A reaction: A striking anticipation of Berkeley's "esse est percipi" (to be is to be perceived). |
| 1545 | Protagoras was the first to claim that there are two contradictory arguments about everything [Protagoras, by Diog. Laertius] |
| Full Idea: Protagoras was the first to claim that there are two contradictory arguments about everything. | |
| From: report of Protagoras (fragments/reports [c.441 BCE], A01) by Diogenes Laertius - Lives of Eminent Philosophers 09.51 |
| 1547 | Man is the measure of all things - of things that are, and of things that are not [Protagoras] |
| Full Idea: He began one of his books as follows: 'Man is the measure of all things - of the things that are, that they are, and of the things that are not, that they are not'. | |
| From: Protagoras (fragments/reports [c.441 BCE], B01), quoted by Diogenes Laertius - Lives of Eminent Philosophers 09.51 |
| 3305 | There is no more purely metaphysical doctrine than Protagorean relativism [Benardete,JA on Protagoras] |
| Full Idea: No purer metaphysical doctrine can possibly be found than the Protagorean thesis that to be (anything at all) is to be relative ( to something or other). | |
| From: comment on Protagoras (fragments/reports [c.441 BCE]) by José A. Benardete - Metaphysics: the logical approach Ch.3 |
| 3317 | You can only state the problem of the relative warmth of an object by agreeing on the underlying object [Benardete,JA on Protagoras] |
| Full Idea: Only if the thing that is cold to me is precisely identical with the thing that is not cold to you can Protagoras launch his argument, but then it is seen to be the thing in itself that exists absolutely speaking. | |
| From: comment on Protagoras (fragments/reports [c.441 BCE]) by José A. Benardete - Metaphysics: the logical approach Ch.8 |
| 3313 | If my hot wind is your cold wind, then wind is neither hot nor cold, and so not as cold as itself [Benardete,JA on Protagoras] |
| Full Idea: Because the wind is cold to me but not you, Protagoras takes it to in itself neither cold nor not-cold. Accordingly, I very much doubt that he can allow the wind to be exactly as cold as itself. | |
| From: comment on Protagoras (fragments/reports [c.441 BCE]) by José A. Benardete - Metaphysics: the logical approach Ch.8 |
| 247 | God is "the measure of all things", more than any man [Plato on Protagoras] |
| Full Idea: In our view it is God who is pre-eminently the "measure of all things", much more so than any "man", as they say. | |
| From: comment on Protagoras (fragments/reports [c.441 BCE]) by Plato - The Laws 716c |
| 606 | Protagoras absurdly thought that the knowing or perceiving man is 'the measure of all things' [Aristotle on Protagoras] |
| Full Idea: When Protagoras quipped that man is the measure of all things, he had in mind, of course, the knowing or perceiving man. The grounds are that they have perception/knowledge, and these are said to be the measures of objects. Utter nonsense! | |
| From: comment on Protagoras (fragments/reports [c.441 BCE]) by Aristotle - Metaphysics 1053b |
| 612 | Relativists think if you poke your eye and see double, there must be two things [Aristotle on Protagoras] |
| Full Idea: In fact there is no difference between Protagoreanism and saying this: if you stick your finger under your eyes and make single things seem two, then they are two, just because they seem to be two. | |
| From: comment on Protagoras (fragments/reports [c.441 BCE]) by Aristotle - Metaphysics 1063a06 |
| 20429 | Most of us are too close to our own motives to understand them [Fry] |
| Full Idea: The motives we actually experience are too close to us to enable us to feel them clearly. They are in a sense unintelligible. | |
| From: Roger Fry (An Essay in Aesthetics [1909], p.30) | |
| A reaction: Fry is defending the role of art in clarifying and highlighting such things, but I am not convinced by his claim. We can grasp most of our motives with a little introspection, and those we can't grasp are probably too subtle for art as well. |
| 20424 | Imaginative life requires no action, so new kinds of perception and values emerge in art [Fry] |
| Full Idea: In the imaginative life no action is necessary, so the whole consciousness may be focused upon the perceptive and the emotional aspects of the experience. Hence we get a different set of values, and a different kind of perception | |
| From: Roger Fry (An Essay in Aesthetics [1909], p.24) | |
| A reaction: Good. A huge range of human activities are like scientific experiments, where you draw on our evolved faculties, but put them in controlled conditions, where the less convenient and stressful parts are absent. War and sport. Real and theatrical tragedy. |
| 20427 | Everyone reveals an aesthetic attitude, looking at something which only exists to be seen [Fry] |
| Full Idea: It is only when an object exists for no other purpose than to be seen that we really look at it, …and then even the most normal person adopts to some extent the artistic attitude of pure vision abstracted from necessity. | |
| From: Roger Fry (An Essay in Aesthetics [1909], p.29) | |
| A reaction: A painter of still life looks at things which exist for other purposes, with just the attitude which Fry attributes to the viewers of the paintings. We can encourage a child to look at a flower with just this attitude. |
| 20433 | 'Beauty' can either mean sensuous charm, or the aesthetic approval of art (which may be ugly) [Fry] |
| Full Idea: There is an apparent contradiction between two distinct uses of the word 'beauty', one for that which has sensuous charm, and one for the aesthetic approval of works of imaginative art where the objects presented to us are often of extreme ugliness. | |
| From: Roger Fry (An Essay in Aesthetics [1909], p.33) | |
| A reaction: The gouging of eyes in 'King Lear' was always the big problem case for aesthetics, just as nowadays it is Marcel Duchamp's wretched 'Fountain'. |
| 20430 | In life we neglect 'cosmic emotion', but it matters, and art brings it to the fore [Fry] |
| Full Idea: Those feelings unhappily named cosmic emotion find almost no place in life, but, since they seem to belong to certain very deep springs of our nature, do become of great importance in the arts. | |
| From: Roger Fry (An Essay in Aesthetics [1909], p.31) | |
| A reaction: Focus on the sublime was big in the romantic era, but Fry still sees its importance, and I don't think it ever goes away. Art styles which scorn the sublime are failing to perform their social duty, say I. |
| 20431 | Art needs a mixture of order and variety in its sensations [Fry] |
| Full Idea: The first quality that we demand in our [artistic] sensations will be order, without which our sensations will be troubled and perplexed, and the other will be variety, without which they will not be fully stimulated. | |
| From: Roger Fry (An Essay in Aesthetics [1909], p.32) | |
| A reaction: He makes good claims, but gives unconvincing reasons for them. Some of us rather like 'troubled and perplexed' sensations. And a very narrow range of sensations could still be highly stimulated. Is Fry a good aesthetician but a modest philosopher? |
| 20423 | If graphic arts only aim at imitation, their works are only trivial ingenious toys [Fry] |
| Full Idea: If imitation is the sole purpose of the graphic arts, it is surprising that the works of such arts are ever looked upon as more than curiosities, or ingenious toys, and are ever taken seriously by grown-up people. | |
| From: Roger Fry (An Essay in Aesthetics [1909], p.23) | |
| A reaction: But then you might say that same about fine wines. A mere nice taste is hardly worthy of grown ups, and yet lots of grown ups feeling quite passionately about it. What about Fabergé eggs? |
| 20428 | Popular opinion favours realism, yet most people never look closely at anything! [Fry] |
| Full Idea: Ordinary people have almost no idea of what things really look like, so that the one standard that popular criticism applies to painting (whether it is like nature or not) is the one which most people are prevented frm applying properly. | |
| From: Roger Fry (An Essay in Aesthetics [1909], p.29) | |
| A reaction: A nice remark, though there is a streak of Bloomsbury artistic snobbery running through Fry. Ordinary people recognise photographic realism, so they can study things closely either in the reality or the picture, should they so choose. |
| 20432 | When viewing art, rather than flowers, we are aware of purpose, and sympathy with its creator [Fry] |
| Full Idea: In our reaction to a work of art (rather than a flower) there is the consciousness of purpose, of a peculiar relation of sympathy with the man who made this thing in order to arouse precisely the sensations we experience. | |
| From: Roger Fry (An Essay in Aesthetics [1909], p.33) | |
| A reaction: I think this is entirely right. I like the mention of 'sympathy' as well as 'purpose'. |
| 20425 | In the cinema the emotions are weaker, but much clearer than in ordinary life [Fry] |
| Full Idea: One notices in the visions of the cinematograph that whatever emotions are aroused by them, though they are likely to be weaker than those of ordinary life, are presented more clearly to the conscious. | |
| From: Roger Fry (An Essay in Aesthetics [1909], p.25) | |
| A reaction: Fry had probably only seen very simple melodramas, but the general idea that artistic emotions are weaker than real life, but much clearer, is quite plausible. |
| 20426 | For pure moralists art must promote right action, and not just be harmless [Fry] |
| Full Idea: To the pure moralist, accepting nothing but ethical values, to be justified, the life of the imagination must be shown not only not to hinder but actually to forward right action, otherwise it is not only useless but, by absorbing energies, harmful. | |
| From: Roger Fry (An Essay in Aesthetics [1909], p.26) | |
| A reaction: I think this is the sort of attitude you find in Samuel Johnson. Puritans even reject light music, which seems pleasantly harmless to the rest of us. 'Absorbing energies' doesn't sound much of an objection, and may not be the actual objection. |
| 6016 | Early sophists thought convention improved nature; later they said nature was diminished by it [Protagoras, by Miller,FD] |
| Full Idea: Protagoras and Hippias evidently believed that convention was an improvement on nature, whereas later sophists such as Antiphon, Thrasymachus and Callicles seemed to contend that conventional morality was undermined because it was 'against nature'. | |
| From: report of Protagoras (fragments/reports [c.441 BCE]) by Fred D. Miller jr - Classical Political Thought | |
| A reaction: This gets to the heart of a much more interesting aspect of the nomos-physis (convention-nature) debate, rather than just a slanging match between relativists and the rest. The debate still goes on, over issues about the free market and intervention. |
| 1580 | For Protagoras the only bad behaviour is that which interferes with social harmony [Protagoras, by Roochnik] |
| Full Idea: For Protagoras the only constraint on human behaviour is that it not interfere with social harmony, the essential condition for human survival. | |
| From: report of Protagoras (fragments/reports [c.441 BCE]) by David Roochnik - The Tragedy of Reason p.63 |
| 205 | Protagoras contradicts himself by saying virtue is teachable, but then that it is not knowledge [Plato on Protagoras] |
| Full Idea: Protagoras claimed that virtue was teachable, but now tries to show it is not knowledge, which makes it less likely to be teachable. | |
| From: comment on Protagoras (fragments/reports [c.441 BCE]) by Plato - Protagoras 361b |
| 1659 | Protagoras seems to have made the huge move of separating punishment from revenge [Protagoras, by Vlastos] |
| Full Idea: The distinction of punishment from revenge must be regarded as one of the most momentous of the conceptual discoveries ever made by humanity in the course of its slow, tortuous, precarious, emergence from barbaric tribalism. Protagoras originated it. | |
| From: report of Protagoras (fragments/reports [c.441 BCE]) by Gregory Vlastos - Socrates: Ironist and Moral Philosopher p.187 |
| 532 | Successful education must go deep into the soul [Protagoras] |
| Full Idea: Education does not take root in the soul unless one goes deep. | |
| From: Protagoras (fragments/reports [c.441 BCE], B11), quoted by Plutarch - On Practice 178.25 |
| 1552 | He spent public money on education, as it benefits the individual and the state [Protagoras, by Diodorus of Sicily] |
| Full Idea: He used legislation to improve the condition of illiterate people, on the grounds that they lack one of life's great goods, and thought literacy should be a matter of public concern and expense. | |
| From: report of Protagoras (fragments/reports [c.441 BCE]) by Diodorus of Sicily - Universal History 12.13.3.3 |
| 6005 | Animals are dangerous and nourishing, and can't form contracts of justice [Hermarchus, by Sedley] |
| Full Idea: Hermarchus said that animal killing is justified by considerations of human safety and nourishment and by animals' inability to form contractual relations of justice with us. | |
| From: report of Hermarchus (fragments/reports [c.270 BCE]) by David A. Sedley - Hermarchus | |
| A reaction: Could the last argument be used to justify torturing animals? Or could we eat a human who was too brain-damaged to form contracts? |
| 1551 | He said he didn't know whether there are gods - but this is the same as atheism [Diogenes of Oen. on Protagoras] |
| Full Idea: He said that he did not know whether there were gods - but this is the same as saying that he knew there were no gods. | |
| From: comment on Protagoras (fragments/reports [c.441 BCE], A23) by Diogenes (Oen) - Wall inscription 11 Chil 2 |