Protagoras and the Challenge of Relativism

Ugo Zilioli is Marie Curie Experienced Researcher at Durham University, UK

• Contents: Preface; Introduction: Protagoras, Plato and relativism; Perceptions and indeterminacy; Wisdom and incommensurability; Ethics and forms of life; Inconsistency, self-refutation and the heart of the matter; Conclusions: the tools of relativism; Bibliography; Index.

'To defend relativism is about as thankless a task as philosophy ever confronted: informed readers typically take it to be a complete waste of time and even a mark of professional incompetence. But then, if you see its genuinely deep challenge, its defense counts as an exceptional kind of courage and amplitude of mind that very little else in philosophy ever equals. Zilioli embodies a candor and honesty and a scholar's thoroughness and scruple that are simply a pleasure to trust in the unraveling of the full import of Plato's treatment of Protagoras's argument in the Theaetetus and Protagoras. I think it's the straightforward clarity and passion of Zilioli's effort that makes it so memorable. Beyond that, it seems to me to have simply outflanked Protagoras's strongest detractors.' Joseph Margolis, Temple University, USA