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Protagoras
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The victory of Socrates over Protagoras is in every way complete when their minds are fairly brought together. Protagoras falls before him after two or three blows. Socrates partially gains his object in the first part of the Dialogue, and completely in the second. Nor does he appear at any disadvantage when subjected to 'the question' by Protagoras. He succeeds in making his two 'friends,' Prodicus and Hippias, ludicrous by the way; he ... makes a long speech in defence of the poem of Simonides, after the manner of the Sophists, showing, as Alcibiades says, that he is only pretending to have a bad memory, and that he and not Protagoras is really a master in the two styles of speaking; and that he can undertake, not one side of the argument only, but both, when Protagoras begins to break down. Against the authority of the poets with whom Protagoras has ingeniously identified himself at the commencement of the Dialogue, Socrates sets up the proverbial philosophers and those masters of brevity the Lacedaemonians.
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Even though Protagoras was a contemporary of Socrates, the philosopher of Abdera is considered a presocratic thinker. He followed the Ionian tradition that distinguishes the School of Abdera. The distinctive note of this tradition is criticism, a systematic discussion that can be identified as "presocratic dialectic", an alternative to the Aristotelian demonstrative method which, according to Karl Popper, has the fault of being dogmatic. The main contribution of Protagoras was perhaps his method of finding a better argument by discarding the less viable one. This is known as "Antilogies", and consists of two premises; the first is "Before any uncertainty two opposite theses can validly be confronted", the second is its complement: the need to "strengthen the weaker argument".
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Protagoras, like Democritus, came from Abdera, on the Thracian coast. An ancient story relates that he was at first a porter and that Democritus of Abdera saw him, admired his poise, and decided to instruct him; but this story's truth is doubtful. Protagoras reflected on language and developed a system of grammar. Having settled in Athens, where he taught the youth, he won the respect of Pericles, who commissioned him to frame laws for the new colony of Thurii, in Italy. At age seventy he was accused and convicted of atheism and is said to have left for Sicily and to have drowned at sea.
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Protagoras says that he has two good pieces of evidence that people agree with him. First, people do not rebuke the ugly, dwarfish, and weak, but pity them, because they cannot help being as they are (323d). Second, they do instruct people who are unjust and irreligious, hoping to impart goodness in them. He says that parents begin with their children from earliest childhood, and teachers carry on the task. Protagoras states that none of this is surprising, but what would be surprising is if this were not the case (326e). He closes by addressing Socrates's question why, if virtue is teachable, the sons of virtuous men often lack virtue.
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Protagoras (480-410 B.C.E.) was born in Abdera, a coastal town in the northernmost hub of the Aegaean sea. Along with Anaxagoras and Zeno of Elea, he enjoyed the patronage of Pericles (495-429), the enlightened political leader and military general most responsible for the development of the Athenian democracy and the rise of the Greek Empire. Protagoras spent most of his adult life traveling throughout the Empire, teaching anyone for a fee. His exposure to many different societies, with lots of different customs, laws, and religions no doubt impressed upon him the vast latitude of ideas that the human mind could accept as true. Himself a teacher of Pericles, he showed the great leader the extent to which religious and moral codes were based not upon nature or some god-given truth but on socially constructed conventions. Rhetoric, the art of persuasive speech, could and should therefore according to him be used to influence people's opinions and change them in ways that great leaders like Pericles could see would be best, at least relative to the interests of the society.
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Protagoras was born in Abdera, the native city of Democritus, and spent much of his life as an itinerant Sophist, traveling throughout the Greek world. He was a frequent visitor to Athens, being a friend of Pericles, and was said to have aided in framing the constitution for the colony of Thurii, which the Athenians established in southern Italy in 444/443 BC. Plato said that Protagoras spent 40 years teaching and that he died at the age of 70. Stories about an indictment against Protagoras by the Athenians, the burning of his books, and his death at sea are probably fictitious.
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Protagoras