David Butterfield

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739 appearances 1 recordings 1 series first heard May 2026 last heard 20 May

David Butterfield’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

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Recordings per month over the last 12 months — 1 in all, peaking in May 2026 with 1.

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TRIGGERnometry · How Civilisations Die - Ancient Greece Expert David Butterfield · 20 May 2026 podcast

So at this time when everything rests upon what the assembly decides, clearly rhetoric, words, oratory have immense power.

And a new kind of intellectual or guru literally turns up in Athens called the sophist.

And the sophist is built entirely around rhetorical tricks, which will make the worse argument sound the better.

And one of the leading sophists was a guy called Protagoras.

And the reason he's important is he is the guy who opened the door to relativism.

Protagoras as a sophist said, man is the measure of all things.

But what he meant specifically by that is you as an individual man, Francis, you can decide how the world around you is.

You make your own truth.

Everything is unstable and subjective.

Words can mean one thing and another.

There's no better or worse course.

We'll just frame it in a certain way.

And the Sophists were regarded as a toxic presence in Athenian society because they, as you say, took the foundations away from the democratic principles of wanting to do the actually best thing.

So I'm with you entirely.

As soon as one believes not only that there isn't an objective truth, but with that we each have our own meaningful truths, the whole academic game is over.

We may as well all pack up and go home.

It's basically then a sort of vanity project, an art installation, us saying what we like about the world around us.

What's really shocking, and maybe the viewers don't know how widespread this is, is that in the humanities and the social sciences, it is a majority view that there is no objective truth.

Yeah.

I don't know why you're... Look, let's not be fake about it.

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