Protagoreanadj.n.

1658 J. Robinson Stone to Altar 96 Without subscribing to a Protagorean Sceptism, That which is true in one place, may be false in another.

1678 R. Cudworth True Intellect. Syst. Universe i. i. 10 The Protagorean Philosophy made all things to consist of a Commixture of Parts (or Atoms) and Local Motion.

a1832 Encycl. Metrop. (1845) II. 614/1 The need of such a measure, he asserts, in opposition to the Protagorean notion of man being the measure of all things, which he treats as a silly truism.

1887 Encycl. Brit. XXII. 236/1 Socrates rested his scepticism upon the Protagorean doctrine that man is the measure of his own sensations and feelings.

1907 Hibbert Jrnl. Jan. 439 A Protagorean treatise of the fifth century b.c.

1921 T. R. Glover Pilgrim 176 The idea of Christian charity has been perverted,..to mean a Protagorean acceptance of the equal value of all opinions.

1954 Ess. in Crit. 4 55 There Arnold figures as a Protagorean sceptic.

1964 H. D. Rankin Plato & Individual i. 11 Plato was very far from accepting the Protagorean view that all men had political potentialities distinct from their ability to live in the group.

2005 Times Lit. Suppl. 15 Apr. 4/4 Plato and Aristotle..were preceded and followed by numerous thinkers..who also made remarkable contributions to the methodology, debating points, and conceptual apparatus of the ongoing philosophical tradition (for instance, Protagorean relativism, Socratic questioning, Epicurean hedonism).

a1688 R. Cudworth tr. Plato Theætetus in Treat. Concerning Eternal & Immutable Morality (1731) i. i. 2 As to things Just and Unjust, Holy and Unholy, not only the Protagoreans (of whom we shall treat afterward) but many other Philosophers also confidently affirm, that none of these things have in Nature any Essence of their own.

1745 W. Warburton in A. Pope Ess. on Man ii. 44 The Protagorean, which held that Man was..the measure of all things.

1870 A. Bain Mental & Moral Sci. (new ed.) 47 The whole of the reasoning in this part of the Metaphysica, is directed indiscriminately and in the same words against Protagoreans and Heracleiteans.

1906 Mind 15 69 The recent invalidating of the antinomies however is a point in favour of the rationalist against the modern Protagoreans of ‘Humanism’.

1936 Amer. Jrnl. Philol. 57 454 Aristotle accuses the Protagoreans, in the same terms as does Plato, of denying the laws of logic.

1977 Jrnl. Hellenic Stud. 97 181/1 One is tempted to suspect that if there really existed Protagoreans or Heracliteans or Megarians capable of the sophistication Plato ascribes to his straw opponents, we should have heard their names from Aristotle more often than we do.

2002 Amer. Polit. Sci. Rev. 96 283/2 Both the Philosophers and the Protagoreans wish to deny any tension between the particular and the whole.

1901 Philos. Rev. 10 329 The obvious similarities with various forms of Protagoreanism and positivism are noted.

1932 Times Lit. Suppl. 21 Apr. 282/2 It supplies the key to the interpretation of the refined Protagoreanism which the author avows.

1990 New Republic (Nexis) 24 Sept. 39 With its images of crucifixion and spiritual ascent, its bloody footsteps and its flaky succession of gurus..this is essentially a one-man system. It even manages to accommodate an element of Protagoreanism.