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The Measure of A l Things l

Missed It by THAT Much

According to Plato, Protagoras was the first sophist, or teacher of virtue—

a subject that greatly fascinated the Greek philosophers. His most famous

saying was “Man is the measure of all things: of things which are, that

they are, and of things which are not, that they are not.”^1 The second part

of the sentence established Protagoras as the first relativist, but to me the

first part of the sentence is the more interesting, because I think Protago-

ras missed it by just a single letter. Things have their measure—it is an

intrinsic property of things. Man is not the measure of all things, but the

measurer of all things.

Measurement is one of man’s greatest achievements. While language

and tools may be the inventions that initially enabled civilization to exist,

without measurement it could not have progressed very far. Measure-

ment and counting, the obvious predecessors to measurement, were

man’s initial forays into mathematics and science. Today, Protagoras’s

statement still raises questions of profound interest: How do we measure

things that are, and can we measure things that are not?