My First Journey By Thomas Nagel - 2559 Words

Our first journey. Probably the best introduction to the world of Philosophy is to think about the most important questions of it. As if suddenly we wake up, and opening our eyes to a new kind of questionable reality, What it all matters, from Thomas Nagel, makes a change into our perspectives and way of seen life. The distinguished author, who ´s brilliant career has been developed on the most important Universities, such as Harvard, Cornell and Oxford. This outstanding work involves the student into the beginning of a universe of inquiry. On that way, Nagel sets the student in front of the central problems of philosophy, as an invitation to grow intellectually and to search and question always the truth and the reality. In the text, nine†¦show more content†¦How much of free will do we have above the determined things in our lives? And finally, what is the true meaning of life? The uncognoscible reality. Everything we experience, from the moment we wake up, and even while we are still sleeping, are stimulus being processed by our own brain. Human beings do not have any other mean to cognosce the environment that surrounds them. Similarly, a person can only obtain with a certain precision the reflection of what exist outside his or her mind. If we accept that statement as truth, then how sure can anyone be of his or her personal perception of the world? Obviously, no one perceives the world exactly the same (i.e.: females tend to possess a more extended palette of visible colors). In his book, Nagel present before us a variety of questions related whit this logic. He tries to explain several problems that we can face when trying to prove that what we perceive about the world actually exists. First, he introduce us a radical view related with these questions called solipsism, which is the belief that our mind is the only thing that exist. The strongest argume nt of this view is that we cannot prove that our perception is an effect of reality, making possible the idea that is exactly the opposite, and what we call reality is indeed the projection of our own mind. This problem will persist as long as an entity that can only obtain a fragment of all that actually exists question itself about if

Essay on I have a dream - 748 Words

I Have a Dream Martin Luther King 1.Comment on the language and style of King’s speech â€Å"I Have a Dream†. The speech â€Å"I Have a Dream† was delivered by Martin Luther King on the occasion of the centenary celebrations of Abraham Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation on 28th August 1963. The speech was dramatically delivered on the steps of Lincoln Memorial and it was witnessed by about two million people. This speech is often considered to be one of the greatest and notable speeches in history and the top American speech of the 20th century. A careful analysis of the speech reveals that it is well researched and skillfully organized. It falls into two parts- the first part portrays the American nightmare of racial injustice , the second†¦show more content†¦The speech was dramatically delivered on the steps of Lincoln Memorial and it was witnessed by about two million people. This speech is often considered to be one of the greatest and notable speeches in history and the top American speech of the 20th century. King envisaged the following developments in America for a better future for the Negroes. He felt that all men were created equal by God. In future the sons of former slaves and the sons of former slave owners would sit at the table of brotherhood. There would be freedom and justice. Their children would not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of character. Similarly the boys and girls of whites would hold the hands of the boys and girls of Negroes. 4.What is the American dream and how does king relate his dream to the American dream? The speech â€Å"I Have a Dream† was delivered by Martin Luther King on the occasion of the centenary celebrations of Abraham Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation on 28th August 1963. The speech was dramatically delivered on the steps of Lincoln Memorial and it was witnessed by about two million people. This speech is often considered to be one of the greatest and notable speeches in history and the top American speech of the 20th century. King envisaged the following developments in America for a better future for the Negroes. He felt that all men wereShow MoreRelatedCritical Analysis of I Have Dream838 Words   |  4 PagesMartin Luther King s I Have a Dream: Critical Thinking Analysis Charles Briscoe PRST 3301 16 October 2012 In Martin Luther King Jr. s seminal 1963 speech I Have a Dream, King uses a number of critical thinking processes in order to present his argument. On the steps of the Lincoln Memorial, at the height of the Civil Rights Movement, King delivered a speech that is remembered now as one of the most significant pieces of oratory in the 20th century. His call was for blacks and whitesRead MoreA Rhetorical Analysis: of I Have a Dream Essay1484 Words   |  6 PagesIn Martin Luther King’s I Have a Dream speech, King makes use of an innumerable amount of rhetorical devices that augment the overall understanding and flow of the speech. King makes the audience feel an immense amount of emotion due to the outstanding use of pathos in his speech. King also generates a vast use of rhetorical devices including allusion, anaphora, and antithesis. The way that King conducted his speech adds to the comprehension and gives the effect that he wants to rise above the injusticesRead MoreMartin Lu ther Kings I Have a Dream Speech1849 Words   |  8 Pagesorganized civil rights activities throughout the United States. In August 1963, he led the great march on Washington, where he delivered this memorable speech in front of 250,000 people gathered by the Lincoln Memorial. Martin Luther King Jr. â€Å"I Have a Dream† speech is one of the most memorable speeches that has ever been given. His speech was inspiring and uplifting to many negro citizens of the 1960’s. King presented his speech because even though the Declaration of Independence stated that â€Å"allRead More Rhetorical Analysis of Martin Luther Kings I Have A Dream Speech987 Words   |  4 PagesIn a period of time where few were willing to listen, Martin Luther King, Jr. stood proudly, gathered and held the attention of over 200,000 people. Martin Luther King, Jr.’s â€Å"I Have a Dream† speech was very effective and motivational for African Americans in 1963. Many factors affected Kings’ speech in a very positive manner; the great emotion behind the words, delivering the speech on the steps of the memorial of the President who defeated slavery. And not only was this message beautifully writtenRead MoreLiterary Techniques of Martin Luther Kings I Have a Dream Speech1223 Words   |  5 Pagesmomentous I Have a Dream speech. This speech demanded racial justice towards the mistreated black community of America. The theme of the speech was that all humans were created equal and that this should be the case for the future of America. Kings words proved to touch the hearts of millions of people and gave the nation a vocabulary to express what was happening to the black Americans. This did not happen by chance. Martin Luther Kings speech was carefully constructed so it would have the mostRead MoreRhetorical Analysis of Martin Luther Kings I Have A Dream Speech810 Words   |  4 Pages1963. He delivered the â€Å"I Have a dream† speech on the Lincoln Memorial steps. He verbalized this speech to millions of people blacks and whites. This is one of the greatest speeches because it has many elements like repetition, assonance and consonance, pathos, logos, and ethos. Repetition in M.L.K.’s Speech Martin Luther King uses a lot of repetition in his speech. They are scattered throughout but very close. One of the repetitions in his speech is â€Å"I have a dream.† He uses this phraseRead MoreI Have a Dream Speech by Dr. Martin L. King, Jr.1129 Words   |  5 Pageson the speech †I Have a Dream† by Martin L. King, Jr. August 28, 1963 was a day that will never be forgotten, in particular not by the citizens of Washington, DC. The city where the great Lincoln memorial gazes across the reflecting pool. Where Lincoln himself, recreated in stone, is looking at the visitors of the city as a president who will never leave his position. At exactly that day and exactly that spot Martin Luther King, Jr. delivered his most famous speech â€Å"I Have a Dream†. Martin LutherRead MoreRhetorical Analysis of Martin Luther Kings I Have A Dream Speech1089 Words   |  5 PagesThe famous â€Å"I Have a Dream† speech delivered by Martin Luther King, Jr. at the historic March in Washington in August 1963 effectively urged the US government to take actions and to finally set up equality between the black and white people in America. Although there were many factors that contributed to the success of the speech, it was primarily King’s masterly use of different rhetorical instruments that encouraged Kennedy and his team to take further steps towards racial equality. King effectivelyRead MoreMartin Luther King Jr: I Have a Dream Speech Critique Essay1251 Words   |  6 PagesI HAVE A DREAM SPEECH CRITIQUE This speech took place on August 28, 1963 millions of citizens, children, law and policy makers attended while 250,000 watched on TV as a Baptist Preacher ,a Boston University Graduate Dr, Martin Luther King stood behind a podium. He established an immediate rapport with an ever changing audience and communicated on a meaningful level, by appealing to moral conscience of Americans standing on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial. He gave the rhetorical demandsRead MoreRhetorical Analysis of Dr. Martin Luther Kings I Have a Dream Speech994 Words   |  4 Pageseveryone as it was a welcoming gesture that was meant to show that both the audience and King were positioned on the same level and although they came from varying levels of education and economic statuses, Kings immediate listeners all shared a common dream, racial equality. This factor most likely made the audience feel that they were equally as important as the great leader in the fight for racial equality. Referring to the listeners, it is also important to note the fact that supporters of changes

Communication as an Essential Part of Nursing

Question: What is communication and why is it essential part of nursing? Answer: Communication is very important in the career of nursing. Here it can be said that effective communication process can help in achieving a better access to patients and it builds up a better relationship between the patients and the nurses. By communication process the information are exchanged with the people. Nursing is the profession where the communication is more important because they are needed to communicate with the patient, the family of patient, the co-workers of nurses, supervisors, and many others ('tabnner's nursing care', 2015). Here some of the skills in nursing can be identified and discussed. One of the most important skills in nurse is listening. Active listening is one of the communication skills which are used in patient care. Active listening needs thelistenerto comment what they hear to the speaker. Because of the health issues active listening plays major role in nursing profession ('Therapeutic Communication Techniques', 2015). Attending skill is an essential part of communication which means the nurse gives her full attention in the patient. There are several features of attending skills like the nurse should have open posture and availability to the patient, they should involve with the patient, the eye contact between nurse and patient is also very important and the nurse should always try to be relaxed with their patient. There are certain ingredients of therapeutic communication. The key ingredients to therapeutic communication in nursing are sharing hope, active listening, sharing observation s, sharing empathy, focusing, clarifying, silence, providing information, sharing feeling, sharing humor, confrontation, self- disclosure, summarizing, paraphrasing and asking relevant questions. The key features in verbal communication are good interviewing skill, speech related gesture, effective speaking, encourage others and summarizing the major communication part. Communication is not only an essential part of nursing it is an essential part in every aspect. Nursing provides both physical and mental care to the patient and sometimes also to their clients who suffered a loss or who requires mental support. In that respect an effective communication not only helps the patient but also to their families. Nurses are the representative of a health institution and they are the main staff who has to directly communicate to the clients of the organization thus it is effected that effective communication will build a good relationship in between the organization and the clients. Today the concept of leadership has entered into the field of nursing and nurses are provided various training program in order to enhance their skills in leadership. Leadership requires effective communication so as to guide other nurses on what to do, on planning and implementing a strategy for providing enhanced form of healthcare for their clients. One of the most important tools for an effective communication is feedback and without feedback a communication is ineffective. Feedback for a healthcare system is important because without feedback an organization cannot understand where the problem lies and how it can be overcome. In that case only a nurse can avail direct interaction with the clients and understand their needs. Only nursing can avail scope for interaction and collect feedback for from patients on what improvement is needed and what can be considered. Positive body languagecan bedefinedas these nonverbal activities and signs that are communicating concern, passion, andpositive reactions to what some else are saying. Positive body language is very important in health care system because the patient and family of a patient both are dependent on the successful communication between them. There are two types of questioning. Those are closed- ended question and open- ended question. Open questions widen the range for reply since they insist further conversation and amplification. The answer of open question is very long and the answer is more specific than the closed question. The scope of Self expression and confidence of nurses are better in open- ended question. The patient should ask questions to the nurse in very less and more prominent words in the Para- phrasing. Para- phrasing is the one of the key ingredient in therapeutic communication techniques (Health.vic.gov.au, 2015). Sometimes silence of a patient is more important for a patient and their family. The patient party only wants the presence of nurse. There is no need to talk all-time. Specifically in case of critical patient silence is more essential. At that time presence is more important to the patient and their family. Empathy is a complex concept which is communicated to clients by some process. Those are ability to understand the patient's situation, perspective, and feelings, ability to act on that understanding with the patient in a supportive way and capacity to communicate that understanding and check its perfection (Kourkouta Papathanasiou, 2014). There are many boundaries which should not cross in nursing. The nurse crosses the self- disclosures mostly today. There are various types of nurse self-disclosure: accidental deliberate and unavoidable. Deliberate nurse self-disclosure can direct to puzzle patients and may damage patient nurse relationship. Patients can feel loaded by the nurses disclosure (2011-2015, 2015). The communication skill is very important for the conversation between family of patient and the nurse. The purpose of the use of humor in communication is to identify the process to ease a positive and productive learning environment for nurses. Assertive communication is a communication in which the impact of communication based on mutual respect. The style of this communication is diplomatic and effective communication style. It is challenging for a nurse to communicate with a patient in an emergency condition. The nurse should deliver accurate information to the patient and the family of a patient (Researcha rchive.vuw.ac.nz, 2015). It is the way of restricting the negative out comes and increasing positive outcomes. By conflict resolution a patient and doctor together can find a pleasant solution (Nursingcenter.com, 2015). In conclusion it can be said that the contributing factors to nursing errors are equipment injuries, documenting errors and medication errors. The documentation is very important in career of nursing. Because of any wrong documentation the patient may suffer. The role of nurse is very crucial because it is related to our health (Nursetogether.com, 2011). The patient is able to discuss the event publicly in open disclosure process. According to open disclosure if a harmful event is happened while the patient was receiving health care, the nurse should inform the patient or the family of patient. References 2011-2015, (. (2015).Verbal Communication Skills | SkillsYouNeed.Skillsyouneed.com. Retrieved 16 March 2015, from https://www.skillsyouneed.com/ips/verbal-communication.html Health.vic.gov.au,. (2015).Open disclosure framework: Clinical risk management - Department of Health, Victoria, Australia. Retrieved 16 March 2015, from https://health.vic.gov.au/clinrisk/opendisc.htm Kourkouta, L., Papathanasiou, I. (2014). Communication in Nursing Practice.Materia Socio Medica,26(1), 65. doi:10.5455/msm.2014.26.65-67 Nursetogether.com,. (2011).The Importance of Empathy in Nursing | Nurse Articles | NurseTogether.com. Retrieved 16 March 2015, from https://www.nursetogether.com/the-importance-of-empathy-in-nursing Nursingcenter.com,. (2015).The Power of Silence. Retrieved 16 March 2015, from https://www.nursingcenter.com/lnc/JournalArticle?Article_ID=685836 Researcharchive.vuw.ac.nz,. (2015).Nurse Talk: Features of effective verbal communication used by expert District Nurses. Retrieved 16 March 2015, from https://researcharchive.vuw.ac.nz/xmlui/bitstream/handle/10063/54/thesis.pdf?sequence=2 tabnner's nursing care. (2015). Retrieved 16 March 2015, from https://www.elsevierhealth.com.au/media/anz/samplechapters/9780729541145/Tabbner%27sNursingCare_6e_9780729541145_Koutoukidis_Stainton_Hughson_SampleChapter_lores.pdf Therapeutic Communication Techniques. (2015). Retrieved 16 March 2015, from https://www.snjourney.com/ClinicalInfo/PracticeAreas/Therapeutic_Communication_Techniques.pdf

Presocratic Philosophy free essay sample

Although Aristotle’s statement is too slight to serve as a sure foundation for judgment, it seems more likely that Thales was arguing for the broader presence of life forces in the world than most people imagined, rather than that the real in its totality is alive. Anaximander Thales’ younger contemporary from Miletus, Anaximander, born toward the end of the seventh century B. C. E. , found the explanatory principle of things in what he called ‘‘the apeiron,’’ a word that might be translated as ‘‘the indefinite,’’ ‘‘the boundless,’’ or both.This opens up the possibility that the apeiron is both immeasurably large in its temporal and physical extent and also qualitatively indefinite in that it is without measurable inner boundaries. The apeiron is further described, according to Aristotle, as being ‘‘without beginning,’’ ‘‘surrounding all things,’’ ‘‘steering all things,’’ ‘‘divine,’’ ‘‘immortal,’’ and ‘‘indestructible. ’’ Some have inferred that Anaximander’s barely concealed purpose was Western philosophy’s first attempt at demythologization. We will write a custom essay sample on Presocratic Philosophy or any similar topic specifically for you Do Not WasteYour Time HIRE WRITER Only 13.90 / page Equally striking is Anaximander’s description of the universe as a closed, concentric system, the outer spheres of which, by their everlasting motion, account for the stability of our earth, a drum-shaped body held everlastingly in a state of equipoise at the center. Whatever the inadequacy in certain details (the stars are placed nearer to the earth than the moon), with Anaximander the science of cosmological speculation took a giant step forward. As far as life on earth is concerned, Anaximander offered another striking hypothesis.The first living things, according to him, were ‘‘born in moisture, enclosed in thorny barks’’ (like sea urchins), and ‘‘as their age increased, they came forth onto the drier part’’ (as phrased by Aetius [first to second century C. E. ]). Pythagoras Although we know that Pythagoras was a historical figure, it is difficult to determine exactly what Pythagoras himself taught. He wrote nothing, and the ideas of other members of the community were attributed to him as a sign of respect and as a way of lending weight to the ideas.Plato and Aristotle rarely assign ideas to Pythagoras himself, although Pythagorean ideas seem to have influenced Plato’s philosophy. Pythagoreans asserted that number is the first principle of all things. They were the first systematic developers of mathematics in the West and discovered that natural events could be described in mathematical terms, especially as ratios. To the Pythagoreans, the â€Å"principle of number† accounted for everything. Number was a real thing. Somehow, numbers existed in space, not just as mental constructs.According to Pythagorean doctrine, the entire universe is an ordered whole consisting of harmonies of contrasting elements. The Greek for â€Å"ordered whole† is cosmos. The Pythagoreans were the first philosophers to use the term cosmos to refer to the universe in this way. The â€Å"celestial music of the spheres† is the hauntingly beautiful phrase the Pythagoreans coined to describe the sound of the heavens as they rotate according to cosmic number and harmony. Xenophanes A fourth Ionian philosopher, Xenophanes of Colophon, born around 580 B. C. E. , s the first we know of to overtly attack the anthropomorphism of popular religious belief, in a series of brilliant reductio ad absurdum arguments. His own view has been understood, ever since Aristotle, as pantheistic. Xenophanes was also the first philosopher we know of to ask what degree of knowledge is attainable. In B34 we read: ‘‘the clear and certain truth no man has seen, nor will there be anyone who knows about the gods and what I say about all things. ’’ Several ancient critics took this to be an indication of Xenophanes’ total scepticism. On this basis of moderate empiricism and scepticism, Xenophanes offered a number of opinions of varying plausibility about the natural world, one of which—a strong, evolutionary interpretation of the discovery on various islands of fossils of marine animals—is enough to constitute a major claim to fame in natural philosophy and ranks with his other significant steps in epistemology (the theory of knowledge dealing with what we know, how we know it, and how reliable our knowledge is), logic (the study of rational inquiry and argumentation), and natural theology (the attempt to understand God from natural knowledge).Heraclitus One of the most important and enigmatic of the Presocratics, Heraclitus (fl . 500 b. c. e. , d. 510–480 b. c. e. ), said that ignorance is bound to result when we try to understand the cosmos when we do not even comprehend the basic structure of the human psyche (soul) and its relationship to the Logos. The complex Greek word logos is intriguing.It could and at times did mean all of the following: â€Å"intelligence,† â€Å"speech,† â€Å"discourse,† â€Å"thought,† â€Å"reason,† â€Å"word,† â€Å"meaning,† â€Å"study of,† â€Å"the record of,† â€Å"the science of,† â€Å"the fundamental principles of,† â€Å"the basic principles and procedures of a particular discipline,† â€Å"those features of a thing that make it intelligible to us,† and â€Å"the rationale for a thing. † The Heraclitean capital L Logos is like God, only without the anthropomorphizing (humanizing) of the earlier philosophers and poets who attributed human qualities to the gods.According to Heraclitus’s imperso nal view of God, the Logos is a process, not an entity. As such, the Logos is unconcerned with individuals and human affairs, in much the same way that gravity affects us but is unconcerned with us. More radically yet, Heraclitus asserted that even though things appear to remain the same, â€Å"Change alone is unchanging. † Traditionally, it has been held that Heraclitus went so far as to claim that everything is always changing all the time. But whether he really meant that everything is always changing, or that individual things are held together by energy (change), remains unclear.Anaximenes Anaximander’s younger contemporary, Anaximenes, who lived during the sixth century B. C. E. appears to revert to a prior and less sophisticated vision in claiming that the earth, far from being a drum-shaped body held in equipoise at the center, is flat and ‘‘rides on,’’ supported by air. The same might be said of his contention that the basic, ‘‘divine’’ principle of things was not some indefinite entity but something very much part of our experience; namely, air.Anaximenes’ view would also no doubt have seemed to be corroborated by the fact that the universe, commonly understood as a living thing and hence needing a soul to vivify it, possessed in air that very ‘‘breath’’ that for most Greeks constituted the essence of such a soul. Parmenides Parmenides of Elea (fift h century b. c. e. ) radically transformed the early philosophers’ interest in cosmology, the study of the universe as a rationally ordered system (cosmos), into ontology, the study of being. By common agreement he was the giant among the pre-Socratics.According to Parmenides, none of his predecessors adequately accounted for the process by which the one basic stuff of the cosmos changes into the many individual things we experience every day. In his search for a solution to the problem of â€Å"the one and the many,† Parmenides turned to a reasoned analysis of the process of change itself. According to Parmenides, all sensations occur in the realm of appearance. This means that reality cannot be apprehended by the senses. Change and variety (the many) are only appearances; they are not real. If this is true, then our most commonly held beliefs about reality are mere opinions. The senses cannot recognize â€Å"what is,† much less can they discover—observe—it, ever. In other words, whatever we see, touch, taste, hear, or smell is not real, does not exist. Perhaps most unsettling of all, Parmenides â€Å"solved† the problem of the appearance of change by concluding—in direct opposition to Heraclitus’s insistence that everything is always changing—that the very concept of change is self-contradictory. What we think of as change is merely an illusion. The logic runs as follows: â€Å"Change† equals transformation into something else.When a thing becomes â€Å"something else,† it becomes what it is not. But since it is impossible for â€Å"nothing† (what is not) to exist, there is no â€Å"nothing† into which the old thing can disappear. (There is no â€Å"no place† for the thing to go into. ) Therefore, change cannot occur. Empedocles posited, against Parmenides, change and plurality as features of reality, but affirmed the eternality of anything that is real; the sphere-like nature of the real when looked at as a totality and the fact that the real is a plenum, containing no ‘‘nothingness’’ or ‘‘emptiness’’.Anaxagoras likewise posited change, plurality, and divisibility as features of reality, yet also affirmed the eternality of the real (understood by him as an eternally existent ‘‘mixture’’ of the ‘‘seeds’’ of the things currently constituting the world, rather than the eternal combinings and recombinings, according to certain ratios of admixture, of four eternally existent ‘‘roots’’ or elemental masses). Leucippus Leucippus of Miletus (c. fi ft h century b. c. e. ) and Democritus of Abdera (c. 460–370 b. . e. ) argued that reality consists entirely of empty space and ultimately simple entities that combine to form objects. T is materialistic view is known as atomism. Leucippus is credited with being the originator of atomism and Democritus with developing it. Rather than reject Parmenides’ assertion that change is an illusion, Leucippus argued that reality consists of many discrete â€Å"ones,† or beings. Zeno Zeno, who was born early in the fifth century B. C. E. , was a friend and pupil of Parmenides.In his famous paradoxes he attempted to show by a series of reductio ad absurdum arguments, of which the best known is perhaps that of Achilles and the tortoise, the self-contradictory consequences of maintaining that there is a real plurality of things or that motion or place are real. The prima facie brilliance of many of the arguments continues to impress people, though it soon becomes clear that the paradoxes turn largely on the failure or unwillingness of Zeno, like so many Pythagoreans of the day, to distinguish between the concepts of physical and geometrical space.Zeno’s way of constructing the problem makes it seem that his primary object is to defame pluralists by attacking the logical possibility of explaining how there can be motion in the world. Gorgias Gorgias has achieved fame for the stress he laid upon the art of persuasion (‘‘rhetoric’’), although whether he wrote the baffling On What Is Not as a serious piece of persuasive reasoning or as some sort of spoof of the Eleatic philosophy of Parmenides and others remains disputed.Its basic, and remarkable, claim is prima facie, that nothing in fact is (exists /is the case [esti] or is knowable or conceivable. Any exiguous plausibility that the arguments supporting this claim possess turns on our overlooking Gorgias’s failure, witting or unwitting, to distinguish carefully between knowing and thinking, along with his various uses of the verb ‘‘to be. ’’ If the failure was witting, the document can be seen as a skillful device for the spotting of fallacies as part of training in rhetoric and basic reasoning.If it was unwitting, Gorgias still emerges as what he was claimed to be—a deft rhetorical wordsmith on any topic proposed to him. Protagoras Perhaps the greatest of the Sophists was Protagoras of Abdera (481– 411 b. c. e. ). Protagoras was an archetypal Sophist: an active traveler and first-rate observer of other cultures who noted that although there are a variety of customs and beliefs, each culture believes unquestioningly that its own ways are right—and roundly condemns (or at least criticizes) views that differ from its own.Based on his observations and travels, Protagoras concluded that morals are nothing more than the social traditions, or mores, of a society or group. The details of Protagoras’s beliefs remain disputed. When he said, for example, that ‘‘anthropos [humanity] is a/the measure for all things, of things that are, that they are, and of things that are not, that they are not,’’ it is unclear whether he is talking about one person or the sum total of persons; about ‘‘a’’ measure or ‘‘the’’ measure (there is no definite article in Greek); or about existence or states of affairs or both.The Platonic reading in the Theaetetus, which takes ‘‘anthropos’’ as generic and ‘‘measure’’ as exclusive, led to the assertion that the logical consequence was total (and absurd) relativism. ______________________________ References: The Columbia History of Western Philosophy. Richard H. Popkin. Columbia University Press. 1999. Archetypes of Wisdom: An Introduction to Philosophy. 7th ed. Douglas J. Soccio. Wadsworth, Cengage Learning. 2010.