Socrates the Skeptic

Protagoras thought that you could make anyone believe what you wanted him or her to believe. "Protagoras is known primarily for three claims: that man is the measure of all things, that he could make the 'worse (or weaker) argument appear the better (or stronger),' and that one could not tell if the gods existed or not." (Poster 1) These are all ways of comprehending that Protagoras was a philosophical skeptic. Specifically, by pointing out that man is the measure of all things, he is expressing that man is no specific thing, therefore opening man to the possibility of being absolutely anything – this idea being as skeptic as it is. .
             On the same note of skeptic philosophers, René Descartes expressed on his Meditations on First Philosophy that he believed that it was possible for all of reality to actually be a dream and that it was possible to live in our dreams. Because of the fact that they were both so similar and that you could experience the same thing in one, as you were experiencing in the other, he believed there was rather no difference. "As I consider these cases more intently, I see so plainly that there are no definite signs to distinguish being awake from being asleep" (Descartes 14). Descartes makes you wonder; if you can dream the same thing you are able to live in reality, on a daily basis, then which one of them is real? And we understand that by his way of thinking and his philosophical ideas and interpretations, that he follows a skeptical kind of philosophy as well. With these given examples, we now fully understand what a skeptic in philosophy is and what philosophical skepticism means. Therefore, the question is now: is Socrates a skeptic, or is he not? By comparing and contrasting some major philosophical skeptics such as René Descartes and Protagoras with Socrates, I will argue that Socrates is in fact a skeptic.