ABSTRACT
The philosophers up to Protagoras offered widely different accounts of things.1 It is not clear not only how we would decide between these accounts, but what it would mean to speak of ‘a right account’. One might say that this is not surprising, since they were muddled thinkers who failed to distinguish between science and philosophy. Further, there is no necessity to decide between their accounts, since they concern matters which are beyond our observation and which make no difference to the problems that beset people, for example deciding what kind of world they want to live in. What would such problems have to do with speculations about roots, seeds, and so on? Thoughts such as these may have influenced Protagoras.
