Protagoras
Pre-Socratic Greek philosopher (c.490-c.420 BC) · Academics · Lived 490 BC to 420 BC · aged 70
Protagoras is read about 528 times a day, in 72 languages.
A typical day, 30 days to 27 October 2026
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Something wrong?He gave us "Man is the measure of all things" - a line that still detonates in first-year philosophy seminars. Plato hated it, calling him a sophist who denied objective truth. What Protagoras actually meant was sharper: your life shapes what you call true, and democracy depends on respecting that.
Also in Deutsch
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About this person
Protagoras worked in Greece around 490-420 BC, before Socrates walked Athens. Plato later grouped him with the sophists and credited him with inventing the professional version of that role. The trouble started with a book called Truth, where Protagoras wrote that each person's history and experience determine their judgments - what's true or good or beautiful shifts with the observer. Plato read it as pure relativism and attacked it; popular opinion recoiled. But Protagoras insisted the discomfort was the point: a working democracy requires you to respect others' perspectives even when they clash with yours, because no one stands outside their own life to see the world raw. The controversy outlived him by millennia.
Academics born in the 490s BC 3
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