Pythagoras (jan 1, 570 BC – jan 1, 490 BC)

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Protagoras became a legal counselor during Athens’s golden age. He even became an adviser to Pericles.

Protagoras’s experience as a lawyer taught him a fundamental principle; every argument has two sides, and both may hold equal validity. This introduced the idea of subjectivity to the concept of belief. For Protagoras, it was the character of the person who held a belief that determined its worth. To illustrate this, he coined the phrase “man is the measure of all things.”

Because he believed that everything was relative depending on your individual point of view, Protagoras considered that absolute truth was unattainable. This is because what one person might consider to be true, another will believe to be false. Protagoras also believed this dichotomy was present in questions of good and evil.

This is the founding principle of Relativism and it was perhaps the first time that an ancient Greek philosopher had examined issues relating to human behavior and morality.

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