This is an attempt to examine a belief prevalent in many works on the philosophy of the sophist that as a school of thought the sophists were relativists, or to be more precise, ethical relativists. The article is composed of two main parts. The first part offers a theoretical framework for the following analysis which starts from presenting and discussing a theory of ethical mutabilism formulated by the Polish philosopher Wladyslaw Tatarkiewicz. The second part contains a review of sophistic opinions on ethical values and attempts to show that they cannot be considered relativistic without further qualifications.
N. Hartmann is a representative of 20-th century absolutism in axiology. The author analyses his arguments against ethical realtivism. These are: emotional cognition of values, its apriorical nature, demarcation of values and their validity and a distniction between relativism and relationism. It turns out that a historical change of valuation is a change of validity and not of the value itself.
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