Greek sophist from Abdera — the first professional educator to charge fees — whose claim that 'man is the measure of all things' is the founding statement of philosophical relativism, and who appears as a sympathetic interlocutor in Plato's Protagoras dialogue.
Articulated the first systematic relativism — 'Man is the measure of all things: of things that are, that they are; of things that are not, that they are not' — making truth relative to the individual or community, and making Protagoras the first and most important target of Plato and Socrates's anti-relativist arguments.
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