In this episode of Notions of Progress — the first of a two-part examination of Plato — we ask what happens to the Sophists’ theory of progress once Plato is done with it. The Sophists had argued that human beings advance through the accumulation of teachable skill: collectively, cumulatively, and through the civic power of persuasion. Plato systematically dismantled each of those claims. This episode traces the first two dimensions of that dismantling through two of the most consequential passages in the history of Western philosophy.

The first is the Allegory of the Cave (Republic Book VII, 514a–521b). The second is the doctrine of recollection, or anamnesis, introduced through the slave boy demonstration in the Meno (80a–86c). Taken together, these passages make a radical argument: genuine knowledge is not built up from experience, it is recovered from what the soul already contains. Progress, for Plato, is not horizontal accumulation — it is vertical ascent toward the eternal Forms, an ascent that is individual, not collective, and philosophical, not technical.

Drawing on W.K.C. Guthrie’s A History of Greek Philosophy, Julia Annas’s An Introduction to Plato’s Republic, and David Sedley’s scholarship on the Forms and philosophical education, this episode opens the question of whether Plato’s vision constitutes a theory of progress at all — or something altogether different.

•     Paideia (pie-DAY-ah): Formation, or the cultivation of the soul. For Plato, paideia is not the transmission of information but the turning of the whole person — their desires, habits, and perceptions — toward the Good. The Cave allegory is, among other things, an account of what genuine paideia requires.

•     Anamnesis (ah-nam-NAY-sis): Recollection. Plato’s doctrine, introduced in the Meno, that the soul does not learn new things but recovers what it already knew before birth. If anamnesis is correct, knowledge cannot be transmitted by teachers — it can only be drawn out through the right kind of questioning.

•     Eikasia (ay-KAH-see-ah): Image-thinking — the lowest stage of cognition on Plato’s Divided Line. This is the condition of the cave-dwellers: taking shadows for reality, images for originals. For Plato, most people, most of the time, live in eikasia.

•     Doxa (DOX-ah): Opinion or belief. The middle range of cognition, where most people who have escaped the cave still remain — aware of the sensible world but not yet in contact with the Forms. Doxa was precisely what the Sophists trained their students to produce and deploy. For Plato, this was the problem.

•     Eidos (AY-dos): Form, or the eternal, unchanging pattern that physical things imperfectly imitate. The plural is ‘eide.’ When Plato says the philosopher ascends toward the Good, he means toward the highest of these Forms — the Form of the Good, the sun of the intelligible world.

•     Plato’s systematic response to the Sophists, organized across four dimensions: collectivity, cumulativity , teachability and rhetoric (episode 7) as civic engine — and what each reversal means for the idea of progress

•     The Allegory of the Cave as a theory of cognitive ascent: the four stages from shadow-watching to encounter with the Form of the Good, and why the ascent is always individual, never collective

•     The Meno paradox (‘80a): how can you inquire into what you do not know? And what Plato’s answer — anamnesis — implies about the nature and limits of teaching

•     In the Meno: Socrates draws out geometrical knowledge from an uneducated slave boy through questioning alone — what this shows about knowledge, and what it forecloses about cumulative progress

•     The Divided Line (Republic 509d–511e) as the epistemological map behind the Cave: the relationship between image-thinking, belief, reasoning, and understanding. More on the divided line to come in episode 7.

•     The political cost of philosophical ascent: why the philosopher, having seen the light, is obligated to return to and to rule over the dwellers of the cave — and what this means for Plato’s vision of the just city

In 399 BCE, a jury of 501 Athenian citizens voted to execute Socrates on charges of impiety and corrupting the youth. Plato was in his late twenties and is believed to have been present. Almost every major dialogue he wrote afterward can be read, in part, as a response to that verdict. The jury that condemned Socrates was drawn from the citizen body that the Sophists had spent decades educating in the arts of democratic persuasion. Plato’s attack on Sophistic rhetoric — and on the claims of democracy itself — cannot be separated from this biographical wound.

At Meno 80a, the character Meno poses what is sometimes called the paradox of inquiry: “How will you look for something when you don’t know at all what it is? … And even if you do happen upon it, how will you know that this is the thing you didn’t know?” This is not a sophistic trick. It is a genuine epistemological puzzle: inquiry seems to require already knowing what you’re looking for. Plato’s answer — that the soul already contains what it seeks, having encountered the Forms before birth — is one of the most ambitious moves in the history of philosophy, and it has direct implications for how he understands progress, pedagogy, and the limits of human teaching.

To demonstrate anamnesis, Socrates calls over Meno’s household slave — a boy with no mathematical training — and asks him a series of questions about the geometry of squares. Without being told anything, guided only by Socrates’s questions, the boy arrives at the correct answer. Socrates’s conclusion is that the knowledge was already there, latent in the soul, waiting to be drawn out. For Plato, this is not a pedagogical technique. It is a metaphysical demonstration: knowledge is not transmitted from teacher to student — it is recovered by the soul from itself.

The Cave allegory does not end with the philosopher’s liberation. Having made the ascent from shadow to light, the philosopher is compelled to return — back into the cave, back among those who see only shadows, to serve as a ruler of the city. The philosopher does not want to return,but the just city, as Plato conceives it, requires that those who have seen the Good govern those who have not. Progress, in this view, is always asymmetric: a few ascend; the many remain below; and the one who has seen the light must sacrifice the vision to serve the darkness.

00:00 Introduction to Progress and Education

01:18 The Scholarly Guides

01:54 What Episode 5 Established

02:24 Plato's Counter Proposal to the Sophists

04:39 Plato's 4 Pillars

05:32 The Allegory of the Cave: Individual Ascent

05:56 What This Episode Will Cover

07:02 Allegory of the Cave

08:36 The Nature of Knowledge and Ignorance

11:20 The Implications of Plato's Philosophy on Progress

14:56 Against Cumulativity

18:20 Closing

Plato’s most famous image of the human cognitive condition. Prisoners chained in a cave see only shadows cast on a wall by objects behind them; they take the shadows for reality. One prisoner is freed, turns to face the light, and eventually ascends out of the cave into the sunlight — where he finally sees the objects themselves, and at last the sun, which Plato identifies with the Form of the Good. Julia Annas emphasizes that the Cave is not merely a metaphor about ignorance and enlightenment: it is a systematic account of the different cognitive levels mapped in the Divided Line, dramatized. For our purposes, the crucial feature is that the ascent is individual: one person makes the climb. There is no collective advance, no institutional accumulation, no transfer of the vision to others. The prisoner who ascends cannot bring the cave-dwellers with him.

Plato’s epistemological theory that the soul is immortal and has encountered the Forms before its birth into a body; what we call ‘learning’ is, strictly speaking, the recovery of this prior knowledge under the prompting of experience and questioning. W.K.C. Guthrie notes that anamnesis is Plato’s answer to the Meno paradox — it resolves the puzzle of how genuine inquiry is possible without already knowing the object of inquiry. But its implications for progress are radical. If knowledge is recovered rather than accumulated, there is no genuine cognitive progress in the historical sense. Each soul must make the recovery for itself. The Sophists’ claim that wisdom can be transmitted and that civilization advances through the accumulation of teachable skills is, on this view, doubly mistaken: it confuses opinion for knowledge, and transmission for genuine education.

Plato’s epistemological schema, introduced just before the Cave, in which he divides the objects of cognition into two main categories — the visible and the intelligible — and subdivides each. The four resulting levels, ascending from lowest to highest, are: eikasia (image-thinking), pistis (belief about visible things), dianoia (hypothetical mathematical reasoning), and noesis (understanding of the Forms themselves). The Cave allegory dramatizes the journey from eikasia toward noesis. Crucially, doxa — opinion, the highest cognitive state the Sophists cultivated and the democratic city depended upon — falls in the lower half of the line, in the realm of the visible and the changeable. For Plato, Sophistic paideia educates people at the wrong level of the divided line.

•     Plato. Republic, Book VI (509d–511e) — The Divided Line

•     Plato. Republic, Book VII (514a–521b) — The Allegory of the Cave

•     Plato. Meno (80a–86c) — The Meno paradox and the slave boy demonstration

•     Guthrie, W.K.C. A History of Greek Philosophy, Vol. IV: Plato — The Man and His Dialogues: Earlier Period. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1975.

•     Annas, Julia. An Introduction to Plato’s Republic. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1981. (Especially Chapter 10, on the Sun, Line, and Cave.)

•     Sedley, David. “Philosophy, the Forms, and the Art of Ruling.” Chapter 10 in The Cambridge Companion to Plato’s Republic, edited by G.R.F. Ferrari. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007. (p. 256)

•     Retz, Tyson. Progress and the Scale of History. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2022. (See Episodes 3–4 of this podcast for Retz’s framework.)

•     Episodes 5–6: The Sophists — A Fifth-Century Enlightenment? (the theory Plato is responding to)

•     Episodes 3–4: Five Faces of Progress — Prof. Tyson Retz (the taxonomic framework against which both the Sophists and Plato are being read)

Episode 7, Part 2: What Plato Did to It — Teachability, Rhetoric, and the Gorgias.

In Part 2, we complete Plato’s systematic dismantling of the Sophists’ theory of progress. The Meno’s conclusion (87c–100b) revisits the question of whether virtue can be taught — and delivers a verdict that is far more unsettling than it first appears. Then we turn to the Gorgias, where Plato makes his case against rhetoric as a civic engine: that it is not a technê at all but a form of flattery — a practice that produces belief without knowledge, and that corrupts the city by giving people what they want rather than what they need. If the Cave tells us what genuine progress looks like, the Gorgias tells us what its most dangerous counterfeit looks like.

Apple Podcasts

Spotify

YouTube

Amazon Music

Website — notionsofprogress.com

Email: [email protected]

Notions of Progress examines ideas of technological and human progress from antiquity through contemporary AI debates. Each episode features ideas and insights from scholars and practitioners alike through in-depth conversations and essays. The show explores the intellectual history of progress narratives and the debated meanings of advancement — tracing how different historical periods and thinkers have understood, or rejected, the idea that humanity progresses through time.

Host: Marshall Madow is an independent researcher who holds an MA in History from Cambridge University (thesis on Georges Sorel’s epistemology of myth) and an MSc from Oxford University, Saïd Business School (specialty in Complexity Science and Leadership). His current research interests include understanding progress narratives and technological progress from antiquity to the present.

Contact: [email protected]

Social: @NotionsProgress on X/Twitter

For full timestamps, transcript, and additional resources, visit: https://www.notionsofprogress.com/

In this episode of Notions of Progress — the first of a two-part solo series — we ask a deceptively simple question: were the ancient Greek Sophists the original enlightenment-like thinkers of human progress? These were the famous and sought-after educators of fifth-century Athens. They charged fees, itinerant, and claimed that human excellence could be developed, not just inherited. For that, they were called sophists — a word that  still, today,carries a negative connotation.

Drawing on W.K.C. Guthrie’s A History of Greek Philosophy, Rachel Barney’s scholarship on technê and Sophistic thought, Joshua Billings’ work on the fifth-century enlightenment, and the authentic fragments of Protagoras himself, this episode examines whether the Sophists represent a genuine ‘enlightenment’ movement — one defined by empirical inquiry and skepticism toward inherited authority, and a theory of civilizational progress through techne,teachable skills.

The episode includes five key Greek terms that carry the conceptual weight of the Sophists’ argument, profiles the four major figures of the movement, and closes with Protagoras’s great myth of human origins from Plato’s Protagoras.

• Sophistês (so-fis-TAYS): Literally “one who makes people wise.” A professional teacher of practical wisdom and civic skill in 5th-century Athens. 
• Technê (tek-NAY): A Greek word with no exact English equivalent. It equates to systematic, teachable skills — but more than technique. Technê transforms its practitioner. The Sophists believed technê was a key driver of human progress.
• Aretê (ah-reh-TAY): Excellence, or virtue. For the Sophists, aretê was not a fixed gift of birth or divine favor — it was something that could be taught. 
• Nomos (NOH-moss): Law, custom, convention. What human beings have established through agreement and institutions. 
• Physis (FEW-sis): Nature, or natural reality. The tension between nomos and physis — between convention and nature — is one of the defining intellectual controversies of the fifth century as it  informed one’s belief in acquired vs inherited power

• How the word “sophist” went from a term of respect to an insult, and why it matters for reading the historical record
• George Grote’s 19th-century rehabilitation of the Sophists, and Eduard Zeller’s influential counter-verdict — a scholarly debate that still shapes how ancient philosophy is taught
• Joshua Billings on the fifth-century enlightenment: three characteristic modes of Sophistic thought — empirical research, arguing both sides, and critical reasoning about divine causality
• The four major figures: Protagoras, Gorgias, Prodicus, and Hippias — what distinguished each of them and what they shared
• Protagoras’s great myth from the Protagoras dialogue: a three-stage narrative of human progress from vulnerable animals to skilled craftsmen to citizens capable of governing themselves
• Whether the Sophists represent the first systematic theory of progress through human agency — and what that question means for the larger arc of this podcast

Aristophanes’ The Clouds as hostile source material

The earliest surviving satire of Sophistic teaching is not a philosophical argument — it’s a comedy. In The Clouds (423 BCE), Aristophanes portrays Socrates running a “Thinkery” where students learn to make the weaker argument defeat the stronger. Scholars like W.K.C. Guthrie treat this as evidence of public anxiety about Sophistic education, not as an accurate description of what the Sophists actually taught.

Protagoras was reportedly  tried, banished, and his books burned in the Athenian agora. He was tried for impiety, expelled from Athens, and — according to ancient sources — his books were gathered and burned publicly in the agora. The man who said human beings were “the measure of all things” was destroyed by the very democratic city that prided itself on open debate. His books have not survived.

Plato may have built his philosophy in the shadow of Socrates’ death — and the Sophists were part of what he was reacting against

In 399 BCE, a jury of 501 Athenian citizens voted to execute Socrates. Plato was in his late twenties and witnessed it. In The Open Society and Its Enemies (1945), Karl Popper argued that what followed was an act of intellectual betrayal: Plato, he wrote, was Socrates’ “most gifted disciple” who “was soon to prove the least faithful.” The jury that condemned Socrates was composed of precisely the kind of citizens the Sophists had spent decades empowering — ordinary Athenians. Whether this was a conscious act of revenge or something Plato could not fully acknowledge, Popper carefully stated “I cannot doubt the fact of Plato’s betrayal... But it is another question whether this attempt was conscious.” (The Open Society and Its Enemies, Vol. 1, Ch. 10, p. 194–195)

Plato /Socrates/Aristophanes

In Plato’s Apology, Socrates himself argues that Aristophanes’ portrayal — performed 24 years before the trial. Addressing the jury, he seeks to disparage the playwright's work stating “You have seen this yourselves in the comedy of Aristophanes — a Socrates swinging about there, saying he was walking on air, and talking a lot of other nonsense about things of which I know nothing at all."¹

1. Plato, Apology 19c, in Plato: Complete Works, ed. John M. Cooper, trans. G.M.A. Grube (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1997).

00:00 Introduction to the Sophists and Their Legacy

05:37 THe Movement and It’s Moment

09:35 Key Figures of the Sophist Movement

11:52 Protagoras: In His Own Voice

19:37 The Wound That Wouldn’t Close

20:49 What’s Next?

The Fifth-Century Enlightenment:

Joshua Billings’ term for the intellectual culture of 5th-century Athens, characterized by empirical research and systematic collection of knowledge (historia/polymathy), the practice of arguing both sides of questions (antilogy), and critical reasoning about traditional beliefs including divine causality. Billings sets forth a compelling case as to why the Sophists were not peripheral figures but “the characteristic thinkers of the fifth-century enlightenment.” (Billings, 2021)

Technê as Constitutive, Not Instrumental:

Rachel Barney’s distinction between ancient technê and modern concepts of technique or technology. Ancient technê is constitutive: it shapes the practitioner’s character, identity, and judgment through the practice itself. Modern technology tends to be understood as value-neutral tools serving pre-existing goals. For the Sophists, all human progress — from fire to justice — moved through technê in this deeper sense.

The Constructed Reputation:

Because almost all surviving accounts of the Sophists are hostile — especially Plato and Aristophanes — historians must reconstruct what they actually taught against the grain of the dominant tradition. Guthrie argues this requires distinguishing between the Sophists’ genuine philosophical contributions and the caricatures constructed by their opponents first and foremost Plato.

Protagoras’s Myth of Human Origins:

In the Protagoras dialogue, Plato has Protagoras recount a three-stage account of human development: no natural advantages → practical skill through technê (fire and the productive arts, given by Prometheus) → political skill through justice and mutual respect (distributed equally to all by Zeus). This myth is treated by scholars including Guthrie as encoding Protagoras’s genuine philosophical views about civilizational progress and democratic capacity.

The Nomos–Physis Antithesis:

The central intellectual controversy of fifth-century Athens: what is the relationship between human convention (nomos) and natural reality (physis)? The Sophists engaged seriously with this question from multiple directions — it is not reducible to a single position. Guthrie’s chapter on the nomos-physis antithesis traces the spectrum of views, from cosmopolitanism and humanitarian anti-slavery arguments to the more dangerous conclusions drawn by figures like Callicles.

Primary Sources Referenced:

• Plato. Protagoras. (The great myth of human origins, 320c–322d)
• Plato. Meno. (The teachability of virtue debate)
• Aristophanes. The Clouds. (423 BCE — satirical source, hostile to Sophistic education)
• Protagoras. Fragments. (Collected in Diels-Kranz; key fragments on man as measure and the teachability of aretê)

Secondary Scholarship:

• Guthrie, W.K.C. A History of Greek Philosophy, Vol. III: The Fifth-Century Enlightenment. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1969.
• Barney, Rachel. “Sophistry.” In A Companion to Ancient Philosophy, ed. Mary Louise Gill and Pierre Pellegrin. Oxford: Blackwell, 2006.
• Billings, Joshua. “The Fifth-Century Enlightenment.” Chapter in The Oxford Handbook of the Second Sophistic, 2021.
• Bonazzi, Mauro. The Sophists. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2020.
• Retz, Tyson. Progress and the Scale of History. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2022. (See Episodes 3–4 of this podcast for Retz’s framework, against which the Sophists are being read)

Related Notions of Progress Episodes:

• Episode 2: The Promethean Question: Four Greek Answers (the Sophists’ linear ascent theory in the context of Hesiod, Plato, and Aristotle)
• Episodes 3–4: Five Faces of Progress — Prof. Tyson Retz (the “No Progress” category, against which the Sophists represent a dissident voice within the ancient Greek world)

Episode 5, Part 2: The Sophists vs. Plato — Was Progress Possible? In Part 2, we turn to Plato’s response. Where the Sophists saw progress as horizontal — the accumulation of skill, institutions, and civic virtue over time — Plato proposed something different: progress as vertical ascent toward eternal truth, the Forms, and the philosopher’s paideia (human formation toward the good). Werner Jaeger’s Paideia: The Ideals of Greek Culture will serve as our guide.

Where to Listen

???? Apple Podcasts

???? Spotify

???? YouTube

???? Amazon Music

???? Website   notionsofprogress.com

Email: [email protected]

Notions of Progress examines ideas of technological and progress and human advancement from antiquity through contemporary AI debates. Each episode features ideas and insights from scholars and practitioners alike through in-depth conversations and essays. The show explores the intellectual history of progress narratives and the debated meanings of advancement. It traces how different historical periods and thinkers have understood—or rejected—the idea that humanity progresses through time.

Host: Marshall Madow is an independent researcher who holds an MA in History from Cambridge University (thesis on Georges Sorel's epistemology of myth) and an MSc from Oxford University, Said Business School (specialty in Complexity Science and Leadership). His current research interests include understanding progress narratives and technological progress from antiquity to the present.

Contact: [email protected]

Social: @NotionsProgress on X/Twitter

For full timestamps, transcript, and additional resources, visit: https://www.notionsofprogress.com/

In this episode of Notions of Progress - Part Two, we continue exploring the fascinating evolution of progress thinking with Professor Tyson Retz, author of "Progress in the Scale of History" (Cambridge University Press, 2022). In this episode, Professor Retz discusses categories 3-5 of his framework: Relative Progress, Everybody’s Progress and Anti-Progress. He starts this opening by detailing the break from absolute progress to more current conceptions beginning in the 19th century with relative progress. It is during this period that a consciousness arises regarding the unequal costs and benefits that come with progress. This new consciousness extends to re-imagining the relationship between history and progress. These notions challenged previous frameworks that envisioned a progression of stages from “primitive” to more “evolved” civilizations along various paths. In yet another departure, Professor Retz takes us into the 20th century in detailing the rise of neo-liberal ideas around progress and the rejection of deterministic frameworks (e.g. historicism) that prescribe a fixed path for history to follow. It is here that he identifies critical totalitarian impulses that seek to control the course of history armed with the knowledge of these pre-determined forces. Lastly, Professor Retz arrives at the modern era whereby he outlines the turn in historical theories that view humankind within a much larger scale that encompasses a timeline leading back to the big bang and the inclusion of natural histories.

He ends this interview on an optimistic note by highlighting the spirit beyond the enlightenment conception of progress in seeking to inspire collective action to make the world a better place. 

No Progress - Why the ancients couldn't conceive of progress as we understand it. "Societies far and wide in the ancient world believed that time destroyed things rather than improved them." (Retz, 2022, p. 13)

Absolute Progress - Universal history, stadial theory (civilizations move through stages), and the emergence of progress as a "collective singular" blending scientific, moral, and human advancement. (Retz, 2022, p. 16)

Relative Progress - Progress as unevenly distributed and context-dependent. "Progress for some mean[s] decline for others." (Retz, 2022, p. 6)

Everybody's Progress - The tension between collective state imposition of historical direction versus spontaneous market order (e.g. Neoliberalism, the rejection of historicism). "Economic growth became the dominant historical narrative in the twentieth century." (Retz, 2022, p. 45)

Anti-Progress (Contemporary) - Contemporary rejection or skepticism toward progress narratives, driven by environmental crisis, a focus on the impact of humans across geological times,deep and big history (an expansive historical view extending well beyond the emergence of human existence and encompassing a wide range of areas of exploration). (Retz, 2022, pp. 7-16, from the Introduction)

We discuss relative progress as recognizing that advancement for some often meant decline for others, Japan's pragmatic modernization inspiring marginalized communities worldwide, movements attempting to separate progress from fixed historical paths (China's iconoclasm destroying the past to create new futures, India blending indigenous traditions with Western ideas), everybody's progress as the postwar project to measure and export development globally through neoliberal frameworks, Hayek's rejection of "historicism" and his claim that "guided progress would not be progress," the paradox that free markets require regulation to stay deregulated, how states use statistics to construct narratives of progress, the expansion of historical thinking (big history, deep history, Anthropocene) that reduces focus on human action, anti-progress as recognition that we may have progressed toward undesirable outcomes or that technology now controls us rather than the reverse, and the tension between cultural pessimism and techno-optimism today.

Japan's influence on "marginalized states" in the late 19th-early 20th century - Japan's rapid modernization after defeating Russia in 1905 profoundly inspired marginalized communities worldwide, particularly African Americans. Booker T. Washington observed that Japan's rise "has nowhere been studied with greater interest or enthusiasm than by the Negroes of America," demonstrating that non-Western peoples could master Western technologies while maintaining distinct identities.

The paradox at the heart of "free market" ideology - Neoliberalism's central contradiction: "a deregulated market requires regulation in order to keep it deregulated." The supposed spontaneous market order actually demands extensive governmental frameworks to maintain competitive conditions—"no regulation is a form of regulation too."

China's iconoclasm vs. incremental progress - Chinese reformers introduced a radically different conception: "complete destruction of the past in order to create the future you want." Rather than building incrementally from historical foundations, iconoclasm proposed wiping the slate clean to construct entirely new futures unconstrained by historical inheritance.

The technosphere challenges human agency - Peter Haff's theory that "we don't control technology, it controls us"—technology possesses agency separate from human intentions. This represents a fundamental shift from viewing humans as purposeful actors to recognizing non-human forces increasingly shape societal outcomes beyond our control.

The role of expansive conceptions of history - Big history, deep history, and the Anthropocene minimize the role of individual human agency, questioning whether humans remain purposeful historical actors in vast temporal and spatial scales.

Professor Tyson Retz

Associate Professor of Intellectual History, University of Stavanger, Norway

Tyson Retz is an intellectual historian with a PhD from the University of Melbourne. His research examines how concepts like progress, empathy, and historical consciousness have been constructed and contested across different periods.

His first book, Empathy and History: Historical Understanding in Re-enactment, Hermeneutics, and Education (Berghahn Books, 2018), explains the role that empathy played in providing history with a philosophical foundation in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Critical of the psychologism of that tradition, the book develops an alternative to 'empathetic understanding' based on Gadamer's hermeneutical reception of Collingwood's logic of question and answer.

His second book, Progress and the Scale of History (Cambridge University Press, 2022), appears in the Cambridge Elements series on Historical Theory and Practice. The Element develops five categories of progress from antiquity to the present day, examining how scale shapes our ability to perceive and claim progress.

He is also the author of numerous peer-reviewed articles that explore the history of history as a concept and practice. He is a Fellow of the Royal Historical Society, an editor of the Bloomsbury History: Theory and Method digital resource, and serves on the board of the History Education Research Journal.

00:00 Part 2

00:36 Relative Progress

07:09 Decoupling Progress from History

10:16 Everybody's Progress: A Reaction to Historicism

15:44 Statistics and the Narrative of Progress

18:21 Understanding Anti-Progress

24:59 Cultural Pessimism and Optimism in Progress

30:06 The Dialectical Nature of Progress

35:58 A New Conception of Progress

**Relative Progress:** The late 19th century recognition that progress requires evaluation of who benefits and at what cost. R.G. Collingwood defined it as "gain without corresponding loss," marking a shift from universal claims to distributional questions. Marginalized groups formed global networks pursuing progress "in their own terms," though paradoxically still relied on absolute progress as their measuring stick.

**Japan's Pragmatic Modernization:** Japan's unprecedented embrace of progress as an instrumental tool for national survival rather than moral improvement, inspiring marginalized communities worldwide. Booker T. Washington noted Japan's rise "has nowhere been studied with greater interest or enthusiasm than by the Negroes of America."

**Decoupling Progress from History:** Various movements attempted to separate progress from predetermined historical trajectories. China's iconoclasm proposed "complete destruction of the past to create the future you want," while India's revivalist traditionalism blended indigenous traditions with European liberalism.

**Neoliberalism and Anti-Historicism:** Hayek and the Mont Pelerin Society rejected "historicism" (claiming to know history's direction) as politically dangerous. They argued "guided progress would not be progress," advocating for spontaneous market order over conscious historical planning.

**The Regulation Paradox:** "A deregulated market requires regulation in order to keep it deregulated"—the neoliberal "free market" paradoxically demands extensive regulatory frameworks to maintain competitive conditions.

**Statistics as State Narratives:** The word "statistics" contains "state." Post-WWII governments used statistical data as "hard data that you need to know that your life is getting better," constructing narratives of progress through GDP growth, employment rates, and quality-of-life metrics.

**Anti-Progress and the Technosphere:** Unlike ancient "no progress," contemporary anti-progress recognizes that modern progress may be undesirable or that non-human agencies (technology, environmental systems) increasingly control outcomes. Peter Haff's "technosphere" suggests "we don't control technology, it controls us."

Guest's Work: • Retz, Tyson. Progress and the Scale of History. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2022. Cambridge University Press • Retz, Tyson. Empathy and History: Historical Understanding in Re-enactment, Hermeneutics, and Education. New York: Berghahn Books, 2018.

Works Discussed in Conversation (full episode including pt 2: • Bury, J.B. The Idea of Progress: An Inquiry into Its Origin and Growth. London: Macmillan, 1920. • Edelstein, Ludwig. The Idea of Progress in Classical Antiquity. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1967. • Dodds, E.R. The Ancient Concept of Progress and Other Essays on Greek Literature and Belief. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1973. • Koselleck, Reinhart. Futures Past: On the Semantics of Historical Time. Translated by Keith Tribe. New York: Columbia University Press, 2004. • Popper, Karl. The Poverty of Historicism. London: Routledge, 1957. • Collingwood, R.G. The Idea of History. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1946. • Hayek, Friedrich A. The Road to Serfdom. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1944. • Chakrabarty, Dipesh. "The Climate of History: Four Theses." Critical Inquiry 35, no. 2 (2009): 197-222.

Related Concepts & Further Exploration: • Stadial Theory and Adam Smith's The Wealth of Nations • Georges Sorel's The Illusions of Progress and voluntarist Marxism • Vico's philosophy of history and purposeful human action • The Anthropocene and expanded temporal scales in historiography

Related Notions of Progress Episodes:

Five Faces of Progress: A Conceptual Framework for Historical Change |Prof. Tyson Retz | Ep. 3 Pt.1

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F7QEgiLV3G8

The Sophists - A 5th Century Proto-Enlightenment Movement

Where to Listen

Apple Podcasts

Spotify

YouTube

Amazon Music

Website notionsofprogress.com

Email: [email protected]

Notions of Progress examines ideas of technological progress and human advancement from antiquity through contemporary AI debates. Each episode features in-depth conversations with scholars exploring the intellectual history of progress narratives and the debated meanings of advancement. The podcast traces how different historical periods and thinkers have understood—or rejected—the idea that humanity progresses through time.

Host: Marshall Madow is an independent researcher who holds an MA in History from Cambridge University (thesis on Georges Sorel's epistemology of myth) and an MSc from Oxford University, Said Business School (specialty in Complexity Science and Leadership). His current research interests include understanding progress narratives and technological progress from antiquity to the present.



Contact: [email protected]

Social: @NotionsProgress on X/Twitter

For full timestamps, transcript, and additional resources, visit: https://www.notionsofprogress.com/

In this episode of Notions of Progress, we explore the fascinating evolution of progress thinking with Professor Tyson Retz, an intellectual historian at the University of Stavanger in Norway and author of "Progress and the Scale of History" (Cambridge University Press, 2022). Professor Retz introduces his innovative five-category framework that traces various conceptions of progress as part of a layered and contingent perspective from antiquity to the present day.

No Progress - Why the ancients couldn't conceive of progress as we understand it. "Societies far and wide in the ancient world believed that time destroyed things rather than improved them." (Retz, 2022, p. 13)

Absolute Progress - Universal history, stadial theory (civilizations move through stages), and the emergence of progress as a "collective singular" blending scientific, moral, and human advancement. (Retz, 2022, p. 16)

Relative Progress - Progress as unevenly distributed and context-dependent. "Progress for some mean[s] decline for others." (Retz, 2022, p. 6)

Everybody's Progress - The tension between collective state imposition of historical direction versus spontaneous market order (e.g. Neoliberalism, the rejection of historicism). "Economic growth became the dominant historical narrative in the twentieth century." (Retz, 2022, p. 45)

Anti-Progress (Contemporary) - Contemporary rejection or skepticism toward progress narratives, driven by environmental crisis, a focus on the impact of humans across geological times,deep and big history (an expansive historical view extending well beyond the emergence of human existence and encompassing a wide range of areas of exploration). (Retz, 2022, pp. 7-16, from the Introduction)

We discuss expanded ideas of scale in shaping progress narratives, the importance of "domain specificity" in analyzing particular historical claims, progress as a "collective singular"—a layered understanding comprised of multiple meanings, statistics as state narratives of progress, and the tension between optimism and pessimism in contemporary progress debates.

Why ancient Greeks celebrated advancement but didn't believe in "progress" - The Greeks recognized technical improvements in specific domains but lacked the conceptual framework to view humanity as progressing through time as a unified whole in the way it is viewed in the modern era.

Japan's influence on "marginalized states" in the late 19th-early 20th century - Japan's rapid modernization provided an alternative model of progress for non-Western nations navigating imperialism and development.

The paradox of progressive politics rejecting the concept of progress - Contemporary progressive movements often critique or abandon progress narratives even as they advocate for social change.

The role of expansive conceptions of history - Big history, deep history, and the Anthropocene minimize the role of individual human agency, questioning whether humans remain purposeful historical actors in vast temporal and spatial scales.

Professor Tyson Retz

Associate Professor of Intellectual History, University of Stavanger, Norway

Tyson Retz is an intellectual historian with a PhD from the University of Melbourne. His research examines how concepts like progress, empathy, and historical consciousness have been constructed and contested across different periods.

His first book, Empathy and History: Historical Understanding in Re-enactment, Hermeneutics, and Education (Berghahn Books, 2018), explains the role that empathy played in providing history with a philosophical foundation in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Critical of the psychologism of that tradition, the book develops an alternative to 'empathetic understanding' based on Gadamer's hermeneutical reception of Collingwood's logic of question and answer.

His second book, Progress and the Scale of History (Cambridge University Press, 2022), appears in the Cambridge Elements series on Historical Theory and Practice. The Element develops five categories of progress from antiquity to the present day, examining how scale shapes our ability to perceive and claim progress.

He is also the author of numerous peer-reviewed articles that explore the history of history as a concept and practice. He is a Fellow of the Royal Historical Society, an editor of the Bloomsbury History: Theory and Method digital resource, and serves on the board of the History Education Research Journal.

00:00 Introduction to Progress and Historical Context

01:49 The Concept of Progress: A Paradox

04:22 Scale and Its Impact on Understanding Progress

06:45 Absolute Progress

08:24 Scale

10:00 The Role of Sample Size in Progress Claims

11:02 Bury

12:18 Debates on Ancient Beliefs in Progress

15:11 The First Category: No Progress in Antiquity

16:15 No Progress

17:47 Transition to Absolute Progress

20:28 Relative Progress: A New Perspective

22:57 Japanese Perspectives on Progress

25:25 Conclusion: The Future of Progress Discussions

29:54 End of Part 1

Scale in Historical Analysis: The temporal and spatial frame through which we view historical change. Professor Retz's central argument regards the perspective we choose—whether 20 years or 2,000 years, local or global, particular or universal—fundamentally determines what claims we can responsibly make about progress. Different scales make different patterns visible: technical improvements appear obvious at small scales, while universal human progress only becomes visible at very large scales requiring frameworks like "universal history."

Domain Specificity: The problem of conflating advances in one domain (e.g. technology, science) as progress in other domains (e.g. morality, human flourishing, social justice). Ancient Greeks celebrated technical advancement but kept these improvements confined to their domains.

Developmental Improvement vs. Progress: Professor Retz distinguishes between celebrating incremental advances in specific techniques and claiming belief in progress. While "improvement on the iPhone 4" may represent "ongoing cumulative improvement," it does not evidence the claim of "a belief in progress."

Collective Singular: The blending of multiple discrete concepts and meanings into a single overarching concept. This Enlightenment innovation, coined by 20th-century historian Reinhart Koselleck, described the melding of domain-specific advances into a unified narrative of human progress. Progress became a collective singular when scientific advancement, moral improvement, technical progress, and human development were woven together into one unified narrative of advancement.

Vertical and Horizontal Frames: In antiquity, the better life was available vertically—transcendentally accessible now through philosophy, virtue, or looking to the heavens. The Enlightenment shift to horizontal frames meant progress was related to movement over time toward future objectives. This fundamentally reoriented how human action was conceived.

Guest's Work: • Retz, Tyson. Progress and the Scale of History. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2022. Cambridge University Press • Retz, Tyson. Empathy and History: Historical Understanding in Re-enactment, Hermeneutics, and Education. New York: Berghahn Books, 2018.

Works Discussed in Conversation (full episode including pt 2: • Bury, J.B. The Idea of Progress: An Inquiry into Its Origin and Growth. London: Macmillan, 1920. • Edelstein, Ludwig. The Idea of Progress in Classical Antiquity. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1967. • Dodds, E.R. The Ancient Concept of Progress and Other Essays on Greek Literature and Belief. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1973. • Koselleck, Reinhart. Futures Past: On the Semantics of Historical Time. Translated by Keith Tribe. New York: Columbia University Press, 2004. • Popper, Karl. The Poverty of Historicism. London: Routledge, 1957. • Collingwood, R.G. The Idea of History. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1946. • Hayek, Friedrich A. The Road to Serfdom. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1944. • Chakrabarty, Dipesh. "The Climate of History: Four Theses." Critical Inquiry 35, no. 2 (2009): 197-222.

Related Concepts & Further Exploration: • Stadial Theory and Adam Smith's The Wealth of Nations • Georges Sorel's The Illusions of Progress and voluntarist Marxism • Vico's philosophy of history and purposeful human action • The Anthropocene and expanded temporal scales in historiography

Related Notions of Progress Episodes:

 • Notions of Progress - Show Trailer | Ep. 1

https://www.notionsofprogress.com/show-trailer-the-long-road-to-progress 

• The Promethean Question: Greek Views on Technological Progress | Ep. 2

https://www.notionsofprogress.com/the-promethean-question-greek-views-on-technological-progress-notions-of-progress-ep-2/

Part 2 of our discussion with Professor Retz exploring Relative Progress, Everybody's Progress, and Anti-Progress in greater depth.

 Apple Podcasts

Spotify

YouTube

Amazon Music

RSS Feed

Website:

Email: [email protected]

Social: @NotionsProgress on X/Twitter

Notions of Progress examines ideas of technological progress and human advancement from antiquity through contemporary AI debates. Each episode features in-depth conversations with scholars exploring the intellectual history of progress narratives and the debated meanings of advancement. The podcast traces how different historical periods and thinkers have understood—or rejected—the idea that humanity progresses through time.

Host: Marshall Madow is an independent researcher who holds an MA in History from Cambridge University (thesis on Georges Sorel's epistemology of myth) and an MSc from Oxford University, Said Business School (specialty in Complexity Science and Leadership). His current research interests include understanding progress narratives and technological progress from antiquity to the present.

For full timestamps, transcript, and additional resources, visit: https://www.notionsofprogress.com/

Our discussion continues with Relative Progress, Everybody's Progress, and Anti-Progress.

Subscribe to Notions of Progress on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or your favorite podcast app. Rate and review to help others discover the show!

In Episode 2 of Notions of Progress, we explore the "Promethean Question" - examining Greek antiquity's perspectives on technological progress from 700-300 BCE. Did the ancient Greeks view technology as a divine gift or a dangerous curse?

SUBSCRIBE & LISTEN:

→ YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@notionsofprogress?sub_confirmation=1

→ Apple Podcasts: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/notions-of-progress/id1837506445

→ Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/5WgTlVMBfFzrIQwqkqhiD9

WEBSITE: https://www.notionsofprogress.com

CONTACT: [email protected]

---

CREDITS:

Music: "Gnossienne No. 3" by Erik Satie, licensed from Pond5 (Item ID: 45475293)

Music: "Syrinx" by Claude Debussy, performed by Sarah Bassingthwaite (CC BY-SA 2.0)

In "Notions of Progress," host Marshall Madow explores the concept of progress through history, examining technological advancements and philosophical ideas. This trailer delves into themes like AI, transhumanism, and technological determinism, tracing progress from ancient Greece to modern times. It questions the assumptions behind progress and its impact on human life, offering a glimpse of what's to come in the series.

Host: Marshall Madow holds an MA in History from Cambridge University (thesis on Georges Sorel's epistemology of myth) and an MSc from Oxford Business School in Major Program Management (with a specialization in Complexity Theory and Leadership. He is currently preparing PhD applications in intellectual history for Fall 2027, with research interests in how different intellectual traditions have responded to Enlightenment progress narratives and technological determinism.

Contact: [email protected]

Social: [@NotionsProgress on X/Twitter]