Abstract

Relativism, provisionally definable as the view that no view is knowably better than any other, is widely accepted today. The purpose of this dissertation is to understand more fully what relativism is by looking at ancient and modern discussions of this view. ;Chapter one begins by considering Michael J. Sandel's recent discussion of a difficulty that modern liberalism faces in its acceptance of relativism. Sandel argues that relativism renders ineffective the attempt to promote toleration of various practices, and thus we must argue for tolerating them in terms of their goodness. Sandel's suggestion that certain goods are knowable leads us to wonder whether the best life is knowable and hence to reconsider the principle of justice that seems to exclude knowledge of that life: Locke's principle of modern natural right. We first raise the question of whether the basis of the knowability of this principle is found in Locke's political work or his epistemological work. After considering Locke's epistemology and Husserl's revision of it, we suggest that Locke's political work is the principle's ultimate basis, for Locke's mechanistic epistemology presupposes that the highest good, or the Biblical God, has been ruled out. ;Chapter two is thus a reading of the opening chapters of the First Treatise, Locke's work confronting the problem of the Biblical God. We argue that Locke does not show, and is aware that he does not show, that man is naturally free, or that man is not in the hands of the mysterious God who orders human life by means of particular providence. Instead, Locke argues only for the supposition that man is naturally free. ;This result permits reconsideration, in chapter three, of Plato's discussion of relativism in the Theaetetus. After clarifying what relativism is, Plato suggests that there is no argument, beginning from perceptual experience, for this view. He also may suggest that relativism stems from the apparent awareness that we cannot explain the grounds of that experience, which could be the gods