Most Greek thinkers regarded subjective states as modes of accessing objective reality. However, some challenged this realist stance in different ways. The chapter discusses philosophers and theories that belong to the latter group, insofar as they can be claimed to develop different conceptions of subjectivity and, correspondingly, subjectivist – that is, mind-dependent – accounts of the world, knowledge, and the good. The discussion begins with Protagoras’ “man-measure” doctrine, assessing whether it entails epistemic or axiological relativism. It then considers Plato’s Theaetetus and the so-called secret doctrine of flux, which grounds the thesis that knowledge is perception in a radical account of perceptual relativity. The Cyrenaics are examined as proponents of a more explicitly subjectivist epistemology, emphasizing the incorrigibility and privacy of pathē. Finally, the atomist theory of Democritus is explored, focusing on his account of sensible qualities, and the relation between perception and reality. Together, these case studies reveal the diversity of ancient approaches to subjectivism, ranging from mild relativism to proto-Cartesian emphases on the privacy of experience.

In what respects can Epicurean philosophers be described as relativists? After an initial survey, this chapter focuses on their defence of the view that all sense-perceptions are true. Other philosophers associated with this thesis, such as Protagoras, are often taken to be committed to some form of relativism. At first glance, the Epicurean position appears to be quite different: they provide accounts of the mechanics of perception that purport to show that the reports provided by the senses are invariably faithful to some aspect of objective reality. But Plutarch alleges that Epicurus and his followers are in fact relativists in this context. I investigate this claim and argue that this is to some extent a fair characterisation—on the Epicurean account, many perceptual properties do turn out to be relative, in that an object that possesses such a property does so only in relation to some perceiving agent (and may lack it in relation to other agents at that time, or that agent at other times). But other perceptual properties are taken to be non-relative, and on the Epicurean view, sense perceptions are all true tout court, rather than merely in relation to some relevant agent.

Discussions of relativism and skepticism tend to focus on disagreement between cultures and between individual cognizers. They attend less to another phenomenon, namely, that the world seems different to different kinds of cognizers. The Socrates of Plato’s Theaetetus argues that Protagoras’ relativism also applies to frogs, pigs, monkeys, and even gods. Protagoras, however, dismisses this proposal. By contrast, the Ten Modes of Skepticism, formulated by the Pyrrhonian philosopher Aenesidemus, start with a mode that argues from variations among animals. The mode’s collection of variation among animal appearances can induce a kind of vertigo with regard to the question of whether there is a world of stable objects for us to refer to. But it also stipulates that there is a way the world appears to us, qua kind of cognizer. Attention to the First Mode, I argue, flags that Aenesidemus takes a causal, quasi-scientific approach. Appearances are causally shaped by the physiologies of different kinds of animals. They exhibit not only variation, but also regularity. Aenesidemus’ approach is thus a competitor of relativism, which arguably pays more attention to difference than to similarity.

Protagoras is often mentioned in discussions of relativism about truth, on the strength of the position Plato attributes to him in the Theaetetus: “as each thing appears to me, so it is for me, and as it appears to you, so it is for you” (152a). Many consider him the first truth relativist, and Plato’s famous self-refutation argument against him is mentioned in virtually every general discussion of truth relativism. I distinguish a number of possible positions about the content of appearances which Plato might be attributing to Protagoras, only some of which are forms of relativism about truth. I argue that the textual evidence is most consistent with two of these positions, which I call Relational Properties and Moderate Relativism. However, it is not clear whether Plato had the means to distinguish between these positions. I go on to suggest that, far from rejecting Protagoras’s view of the contents of appearances, Plato shares it. Either Protagoras is not a relativist about truth, or Plato is one too.

Chapter 1 delineates the overlapping new paradigms of persuasion elaborated by Thomas De Quincey and William Hazlitt in response to George Campbell and David Hume, and considers their implications for the genre of the periodical essay. Against Campbell’s definition of persuasion as an emotional supplement to rational conviction, De Quincey and Hazlitt, in their essays of the 1820s and 1830s, formulate the alternative of a self-consciously partial and flexible way of holding and forming beliefs. De Quincey’s performance of such persuasion in “On Murder Considered as One of the Fine Arts” makes apparent the problem of anything-goes judgment that leads him, in his “Rhetoric” and “Style” essays, to restrict persuasion to “subjective” domains like rhetoric and poetry. Hazlitt, by contrast, in his late-career essays on belief, opinion, and controversy, endorses malleable persuasion in all domains of dispute and theorizes its unique affinity with imaginative literature.

The chapter examines anthropology’s first explicit engagements with Wittgenstein through the rationality debates and British structuralism. It shows how these developments reflected aspects of Wittgenstein’s transitional thinking about context, particularly regarding questions of cultural translation and understanding. The chapter argues that these debates turned on problems of contextual form that continue to animate anthropological theory.

Since the 1930s there have been intense debates about how far democracy can go to protect itself against its enemies. Hans Kelsen’s antagonistic relationship to militant democracy is well established in the literature and is not controversial. First, this chapter anchors Kelsen’s opposition to militant democracy more deeply and systematically in his own theory of democracy. This sheds light on the reasons why his opposition to militant democracy remained consistently immune to the defeat of democracies – as painfully observed in the 1930s – and to the conviction, shared by many of his contemporaries, that such vulnerability legitimises the prevention of anti-democratic parties from abusing the democratic process. Second, the chapter challenges the common view that Kelsen’s rejection of militant democracy would have no contemporary adherents. It discusses similarities and discontinuities between Kelsen and a new generation of thinkers who also express doubts about militant democracy. In doing so, the chapter offers a fresh look at the strengths and weaknesses of Kelsen’s perspective on militant democracy and assesses its influence on the issue in contemporary literature.

This chapter explores the relationship between Hans Kelsen’s philosophical relativism and his theory of democratic leadership. First, it argues that Kelsen’s theory of democratic leadership cannot be fully understood unless placed within his broader political thought, which includes a commitment to philosophical relativism. Second, it suggests that Kelsen provided an original answer to the puzzle of democratic leadership that is significant in its own right. Writing during the rise of fascism, Nazism, and Soviet communism, Kelsen made a crucial distinction between autocratic and democratic forms of leadership: while autocratic leaders are seen as possessing absolute knowledge and, therefore, hold unlimited power, democratic leaders are thought to carry only relative truths, and their power is consequently limited. Kelsen demonstrated that if we believe moral absolutes exist, it is logical to have an absolute leader with unfettered power. In contrast, if we hold that moral absolutes are inaccessible to human knowledge and only relative truths exist, it follows that leaders should have limited power and be subject to constant scrutiny and control. Contrary to the common characterisation of Kelsen as an abstract and idealist thinker, this chapter shows that his approach to political leadership was normative yet realist. Rather than eliminating leadership, Kelsen associated democracy with multiple, temporary leaders who have limited and relative political power.

The intense search for security has, over the past half-century, become increasingly contradictory in the context of the current global unsettling. The techno-scientific search for increased security is now generating circles of increasing insecurity. This chapter is concerned to understand the foundational unsettling of that world space and its consequences for human security in general, including increasing ontological insecurity. The earliest and most dramatic example of this process is the nuclear revolution. With the dropping of the atomic bomb on civilians towards the end of World War II, the search for an ultimate weapon of mass destruction that would end the war created the conditions for escalating insecurity. The chapter documents elements of this process but, more importantly, seeks to broaden the usual emphasis, drawing the mechanics of military security into encompassing questions of human security (see also Chapter 8 on human security). The chapter draws parallels between the areas of nuclear security, anti-terrorist security, drone assassinations, and biosecurity to document the unsettling of the meaning and practice of contemporary global attempts to securitise.

After an introduction to the general notion of relativism in philosophy, the chapter considers an approach to the study of scientific inquiry that is explicit in its commitment to relativism: the strong program in the sociology of knowledge. According to the strong program, which purports to give a social scientific account of science, scientific knowledge is not so much discovered as constructed by social dynamics that produce scientific consensus. The limits of such an account are explored by discussing both sociological and anthropological approaches. The social constructionist account has been applied to Robert Boyle’s experiments with an air-pump and the criticisms directed against them. Applying similar ideas to physicists’ attempts to detect gravity waves has led to the formulation of a problem known as the experimenters’ regress. Through such cases, the chapter sees how defenders of social constructionist accounts draw upon both history and social scientific investigations of current science. The chapter then surveys philosophical and historical criticisms of this approach.

Samuel Butler sharply divides critics, some seeing him as a relativist and thus a precursor of modernism, others as a purveyor of outdated scientific and philosophical dogma. This essay situates him as a transitional figure, straddling modern and Victorian paradigms in the tradition of the novel of ideas. Butler’s relativistic tendencies emerge through distinctive formal techniques, his chief influence on the modern novel: enigmatic use of satire; rapid, dissonant tonal shifts; defamiliarization of commonplace ideas; and fierce iconoclasm – techniques that fuel his radical questioning both of rationality and of ideas themselves. But Butler also affirmed common sense, instinct, and faith – in opposition to rationality – by conceiving them in Lamarckian evolutionary terms: that is, as repositories of intellectual choices made over the course of millennia and preserved in collective unconscious memory. Butler thus believed that ideas always fall short of truth, even as they facilitate an open-ended, interminable progress toward it.

Understanding human morality is important in appreciating the ethical dimensions of environmental problems. As a first approximation, morality is a behavioral system, with an attendant psychology, that has evolved among some social animals for the purposes of regulating their interactions. This chapter discusses and rejects challenges to morality from amoralism, theism, and relativism, arguing instead that morality is ubiquitous and difficult to escape, does not need the support of God in order to have content or be motivating, and is not culture-bound. However, this does not imply that there is a single, true morality, that belief in God is inconsistent with morality, or that there is no conflict between morality and individual desire. Armed with this understanding of human morality, we are now prepared to discuss some substantive questions in moral philosophy.

In Chapter 2, I develop and defend an account of human rights as universalist and minimalist. First, I characterize rights as universal, protecting all people universally and absent any qualifying characteristic. Second, I argue that the human right to subsistence is a basic human right. I argue that without enjoying the substance of the human right to subsistence, we will neither be able to enjoy the substance of any other, non-basic right nor pursue any other ends, moral, or non-moral. And third, in response to critics who believe that the universality of human rights entails remaking the world in our image (i.e., maximalism), I develop a minimalist account of human rights. According to minimalism about human rights, human rights should enable us to live minimally decent and autonomous lives. On these terms, human rights aim to protect people from the worst rather than to promote the best.