Vero-Falso in Protagora e Gorgia: una posizione aporetica ma non relativistica

The thought of Protagoras and Gorgias is characterized by the rejection of the couple true-false and by the refusal of the eleatic epistemological field. The two Sophists conduct this operation in two different ways: Protagoras puts the "homo mensura" as limit for the human knowledge; Gorgias is directly opposed to Eleatism: he shows that the use of eleatic logic leads to contradictory results. This don't lead the two sophists to relativistic outcomes. Contrary, they try to avoid those, by means the substitution of the criterion of true/false with pragmatic and objective criteria, the useful and the kairos, that are determinated in practical setting. This choice implicates an aporia: the practical efficacy requires the knowledge of the factors involved in the situations and the relationships among them. Therefore the rejection of the epistemological field (and of the couple true/false) proves to be difficult, if not impossible.