ABSTRACT
Plato’s criticism of the famous Protagorian theorem that “man is the mea-
sure of all things” rests on his rejection of anthropomorphism. For Plato,
as the famous parable goes, the world of sensation was, at best, a shadow
of ideal forms and models, projected onto the cave of material experience.
Any measure of order must therefore refer to the transcendental realm of
ideal models and forms, which alone were true and real. Man was not the
measure of all things but rather a copy of the ideal, albeit one with special
access to the ideal through reason. Protagoras, however, located truth into
the empirical domain, making “man” the model, or measure, of order. For
