ProtagorasPlato

A dialogue on whether virtue can be taught. The young Hippocrates wakes Socrates before dawn, desperate to be introduced to the celebrated sophist Protagoras, who is staying at the house of Callias. Socrates accompanies him and draws Protagoras into conversation before an audience that also includes Prodicus and Hippias.

Protagoras accepts the challenge to defend his profession. In a famous long speech he tells the myth of Prometheus: Zeus, fearing that the human race would destroy itself, sent Hermes to distribute justice and shame not to a few specialists but to all men, so that every citizen might share in the political art. Virtue is therefore teachable and is in fact taught, by parents, nurses, teachers, laws, and punishments, from the cradle on.

Socrates then presses Protagoras on a subtler question. Are the virtues (courage, justice, temperance, piety, wisdom) five names for one thing, or names for five distinct things? The rest of the dialogue turns on this. Socrates argues, through a strange hedonistic calculation that nothing is ever chosen except as a means to pleasure and that all moral error is miscalculation, that courage reduces to knowledge of what is and is not to be feared. By the close, the positions have been exchanged: the sophist who claimed to teach virtue denies that virtue is knowledge, while Socrates, who doubts that virtue can be taught, argues that it is.