Philosophy Conferences and Calls for Papers

PROTAGORAS of Abdera, Socrates’ older contemporary, is known as the major
representative of the Sophistic movement in what has been called the Greek
Enlightenment of the second half of the fifth century B.C.E. Yet this Sophistic
and Enlightenment could be viewed as modern constructs that we owe to
19th-century philosophers, historians and classicists who were prone to take
the reports of Socrates’ disciple Plato and Plato’s student Aristotle at face
value and uncritically adopt their inevitably partial perspective and negative
assessment of the sophists.

The evidence reveals Protagoras as an original thinker in his own right, a
fertile mind across the range of intellectual discourse as it was conceived in
this fermenting and decisive period in the history of western thought, fit to
compete with such giants as Anaxagoras, Protagoras’s fellow-citizen Democritus,
and Socrates himself. His most exciting legacy is probably his contribution to
the controversy over the role and relative weight of nature (phusis) and
convention (nomos) in human societies, a debate with far-reaching social,
ethical and political implications. Protagoras’s nuanced account, rooted in a
pragmatically oriented epistemology, philosophy of language and theory of
truth, transcends the opposition between nature and convention as
irreconcilable contraries and may nourish current debates on the natural basis
for a utilitarian morality in a post-Darwinian universe.

The time has come to do justice to an underestimated and much-maligned thinker
by bringing out to what extent Protagoras is the odd man out in a Greek
tradition of ‘thinking in terms of a distinction between appearance and
reality, between mind and body, between intellect and sense’, and is closer to
modern habits of ‘thinking of ourselves, in the wake of Darwin, as what
Nietzsche called clever animals, who find cleverer and cleverer ways of talking
about what is going on, and cleverer and cleverer ways of dealing with what is
going on’ (R. Rorty).

Philosophers, scientists and scholars are invited to take Protagoras’ reported
views further as well as to address problems of historiography of ideas and of
textual analysis involved in the reconstruction of these views. Sessions will
be devoted to the relative importance and reliability of Plato and other
sources for Protagoras’ thought, but also to the assessment of the viability of
—recognizably or arguably — Protagorean positions.

In this initiative, Leiden alumni and colleagues take their cue from C.M.J.
Sicking (1933-2000), late Professor of Greek (1964-1998), who forcefully argued
Protagoras’ enduring relevance to debates on society, morality and politics.

One-page abstracts for papers (25 minutes) centering on the sources for, and the
evaluation of Protagoras’ thought may be submitted before November 1st, 2006 by
e-mail or regular mail. The selection will be completed before Christmas.

Selected papers will be considered for publication in Brill’s *Philosophia
Antiqua* series.

Organizing committee:
Frans de Haas (Philosophy, Leiden)
Jan van Ophuijsen (Philosophy, Utrecht)
Marlein van Raalte (Classics, Leiden)
Adriaan Rademaker (Classics, Leiden)

mailing address:
Marlein van Raalte
Dept. of Classics, Leiden University
Doelensteeg 16
2300 RA Leiden