The Sophists

In every observation or experience there is a subjective factor. This was one reason

why the Eleatic philosophers denied all possible change in the ‘Being’ and maintained that all such change as we experience was deceitful. Anaxagoras and Democritus were very clear about it as they distinguished between the essential qualities of their sperms or atoms and of their aggregations on one side, and our perceptions, which, so to say, ‘read’ them as colours, smells and so on. This problem was central to the Sophist’s school. They posed as the cornerstone of their theories that the individual man is the measure of all things, and concluded that there is no absolute truth, but only the individual’s truth and, therefore, that real knowledge of absolute truth is impossible. Protagoras of Abdera (485-415 BC),  a compatriot and contemporary of Democritus, was the first and foremost advocate of this thesis. While Sophists were basically concerned with pure logic and gave no contribution to empirical sciences like biology, they were feared by people like Socrates, who thought the relativism and subjectivism of the Sophists a danger for morality. Many later naturalists, including a number of present day scientists, maintain that that relativism and emphasis on the subjective side of knowledge either implicitly or explicitly denies the possibility of a science of nature. This position was typical of positivist philosophers and of not a few idealists some fifty or a hundred years ago, but it is still debated by philosophers of science.