Relativism and Relativity in Early Ancient Philosophy (SoSe21)

In this seminar, we will discuss the early texts of the ancient tradition that present, explicitly or not, arguments for or based on relativism and/ or relativity. Relativism will be broadly understood as a preference for using relations instead of properties to think about philosophical matters, with an emphasis on epistemology, aesthetics and morality. We shall examine how different thinkers explained and what they concluded after acknowledging that people formed different beliefs based on the same sensory data, that two sides of a dispute could be both right, and that different cultures had different standards of aesthetic and moral values. We start with the presocratic tradition, including natural philosophers such as Xenophanes, Heraclitus and Democritus before proceeding to Sophists like Gorgias, Protagoras, Prodicus, Antiphon and the Dissoi Logoi. Thus we will be able to see how the problem of natural philosophy may have influenced arguments concerning normative questions in practical matters.