There is an intuitive suspicion expressed in common sense, that certain kinds of objects – namely, objects that seem to be dependent upon social factors – aren’t “really, real”. The intuition is a skeptical one arising out of a default common sense empiricism. While there may be some nominal understanding or some social agreement about the reality of things like national borders or governments, they’re not “really, real” in the sense that, say, an airplane, or a boulder, or a dog, are “really, real”. In contemporary philosophical literature, this distinction is typically understood as an opposition between the realist and antirealist understanding of objects, and is sometimes justified by adding the qualification “social” to the term object. The qualification is correct, but incomplete. This paper will attempt flesh out the notion of a social object, in order to provide a clearer understanding of what is meant by it, and to provide a means by which we might answer the question of whether so-called social objects are in fact, “really, real”.
Plato’s Theaetetus involves a famous exchange between Socrates, an old mathematician named Theodorus, and his brilliant young pupil named Theaetetus, in which they attempt to answer the question of what is knowledge. The common denominator in this exchange, is that Protagoras is an old friend of Theodorus, and Theaetetus has adopted Protagorean relativism as his own doctrine. The exchange between Socrates and the two men is at least in part (in addition to attempting to discover a theory of knowledge in general) intended to demonstrate that the doctrine of Protagoras is self-refuting. This essay will provide a brief overview of the key interpretations of the doctrine of Protagoras, cover the basic arguments and their criticisms by various philosophers1, and then render a judgement (ironically?) in conclusion.
A good friend of mine recently presented me with an abandoned draft of an article. My friend claimed the essay lacked a solid thesis. Though I was unable to convince my friend to revisit it, I still think that a thesis presents itself fairly clearly in the article’s depiction of the famous conflict between C. S. Lewis and F. R. Leavis.
The gradual domination of academia by a regime of forgettable Leavis-like characters has a cause that we are only now beginning to examine seriously, as a culture. These causes may be very difficult to face for anyone who is invested in continuing the tradition of Lewis and Tolkien and yet also committed to a life in academia, because the implications are so terribly tragic. I think this may be the underlying reason why the essay was abandoned in the first place.
