Epistemology after Protagoras : Responses to Relativism in Plato, Aristotle, and Democritus

Relativism, the position that things are for each as they seem to each, was first formulated in Western philosophy by Protagoras in the fifth century BC. Protagoras is famous for his claim that 'man is the measure of all things'; he argued that since things appear differently to different people, there is no basis on which to decide that one appearance is true rather than another. Mi-Kyoung Lee examines his challenge to the possibility of knowledge and truth, and how the three most important philosophers of the next generation, Plato, Aristotle, and Democritus, responded to it. This is the first book to tell a single, coherent story about this crucial chapter in the development of epistemology.