Which of the Following Argued Agains the Sophists the Greek Polis Was

The Sophists (Aboriginal Greek)

The sophists were itinerant professional teachers and intellectuals who frequented Athens and other Greek cities in the second half of the fifth century B.C.E. In return for a fee, the sophists offered immature wealthy Greek men an education in aret ē (virtue or excellence), thereby attaining wealth and fame while also arousing significant contempt. Prior to the 5th century B.C.E., aret ē was predominately associated with aristocratic warrior virtues such as courage and physical forcefulness. In democratic Athens of the latter 5th century B.C.E., however, aret ē was increasingly understood in terms of the ability to influence i'south boyfriend citizens in political gatherings through rhetorical persuasion; the sophistic teaching both grew out of and exploited this shift. The about famous representatives of the sophistic move are Protagoras, Gorgias, Antiphon, Hippias, Prodicus and Thrasymachus.

The historical and philological difficulties confronting an interpretation of the sophists are significant. Merely a handful of sophistic texts have survived and about of what we know of the sophists is drawn from 2d-hand testimony, fragments and the generally hostile depiction of them in Plato'due south dialogues.

The philosophical trouble of the nature of sophistry is arguably fifty-fifty more formidable. Due in large part to the influence of Plato and Aristotle, the term sophistry has come to signify the deliberate utilize of fallacious reasoning, intellectual charlatanism and moral unscrupulousness. It is, as the article explains, an oversimplification to recollect of the historical sophists in these terms because they made 18-carat and original contributions to Western thought. Plato and Aristotle nonetheless established their view of what constitutes legitimate philosophy in part by distinguishing their own activity – and that of Socrates – from the sophists. If ane is so inclined, sophistry tin can thus be regarded, in a conceptual as well as historical sense, equally the 'other' of philosophy.

Perhaps considering of the interpretative difficulties mentioned above, the sophists have been many things to many people. For Hegel (1995/1840) the sophists were subjectivists whose sceptical reaction to the objective dogmatism of the presocratics was synthesised in the work of Plato and Aristotle. For the utilitarian English classicist George Grote (1904), the sophists were progressive thinkers who placed in question the prevailing morality of their time. More recent work by French theorists such equally Jacques Derrida (1981) and Jean Francois-Lyotard (1985) suggests affinities between the sophists and postmodernism.

This article provides a broad overview of the sophists, and indicates some of the central philosophical problems raised by their piece of work. Department ane discusses the meaning of the term sophist. Section two surveys the private contributions of the almost famous sophists. Department 3 examines three themes that have often been taken equally characteristic of sophistic thought: the stardom betwixt nature and convention, relativism about noesis and truth and the power of spoken communication. Finally, section 4 analyses attempts by Plato and others to establish a clear demarcation between philosophy and sophistry.

Introduction
The Sophists
1. Protagoras
2. Gorgias
3. Retort
4. Hippias
5. Prodicus
6. Thrasymachus
Major Themes of Sophistic Thought
1. Nature and Convention
2. Relativism
3. Language and Reality
The Stardom Between Philosophy and Sophistry
References and Further Reading
1. Primary Sources
2. Secondary Sources
3. Other Reading

1. Introduction

The term sophist (sophist ēs) derives from the Greek words for wisdom (sophia) and wise (sophos). Since Homer at least, these terms had a wide range of application, extending from practical know-how and prudence in public affairs to poetic ability and theoretical noesis. Notably, the term sophia could be used to describe disingenuous cleverness long earlier the rise of the sophistic movement. Theognis, for example, writing in the sixth century B.C.E., counsels Cyrnos to adapt his discourse to different companions, because such cleverness (sophi ē) is superior to fifty-fifty a great excellence (Elegiac Poems, 1072, 213).

In the fifth century B.C.E. the term sophist ēs was notwithstanding broadly applied to 'wise men', including poets such as Homer and Hesiod, the Seven Sages, the Ionian 'physicists' and a diversity of seers and prophets. The narrower utilize of the term to refer to professional person teachers of virtue or excellence (aret ē) became prevalent in the second half of the fifth century B.C.East., although this should non be taken to imply the presence of a clear distinction between philosophers, such as Socrates, and sophists, such as Protagoras, Gorgias and Prodicus. This much is evident from Aristophanes' play The Clouds (423 B.C.Due east.), in which Socrates is depicted as a sophist and Prodicus praised for his wisdom.

Aristophanes' play is a skillful starting point for understanding Athenian attitudes towards sophists. The Clouds depicts the tribulations of Strepsiades, an elderly Athenian citizen with significant debts. Deciding that the best way to discharge his debts is to defeat his creditors in court, he attends The Thinkery, an plant of higher teaching headed up by the sophist Socrates. When he fails to acquire the art of speaking in The Thinkery, Strepsiades persuades his initially reluctant son, Pheidippides, to back-trail him. Here they run across two associates of Socrates, the Stronger and the Weaker Arguments, who represent lives of justice and self-discipline and injustice and self-indulgence respectively. On the footing of a pop vote, the Weaker Statement prevails and leads Pheidippides into The Thinkery for an teaching in how to make the weaker argument defeat the stronger. Strepsiades afterwards revisits The Thinkery and finds that Socrates has turned his son into a pale and useless intellectual. When Pheidippides graduates, he subsequently prevails not but over Strepsiades' creditors, but besides beats his father and offers a persuasive rhetorical justification for the act. Every bit Pheidippides prepares to beat his female parent, Strepsiades' indignation motivates him to lead a tearing mob assail on The Thinkery.

Aristophanes' depiction of Socrates the sophist is revealing on at least 3 levels. In the start instance, it demonstrates that the distinction between Socrates and his sophistic counterparts was far from clear to their contemporaries. Although Socrates did not accuse fees and frequently asserted that all he knew was that he was ignorant of most matters, his association with the sophists reflects both the indeterminacy of the term sophist and the difficulty, at least for the everyday Athenian denizen, of distinguishing his methods from theirs. Secondly, Aristophanes' depiction suggests that the sophistic didactics reflected a turn down from the heroic Athens of earlier generations. Thirdly, the attribution to the sophists of intellectual deviousness and moral doubt predates Plato and Aristotle.

Hostility towards sophists was a significant factor in the determination of the Athenian d ēmos to condemn Socrates to the death sentence for impiety. Anytus, who was one of Socrates' accusers at his trial, was clearly unconcerned with details such as that the man he defendant did non claim to teach aret ē or extract fees for so doing. He is depicted by Plato as suggesting that sophists are the ruin of all those who come into contact with them and as advocating their expulsion from the metropolis (Meno, 91c-92c). Equally every bit revealing, in terms of attitudes towards the sophists, is Socrates' discussion with Hippocrates, a wealthy immature Athenian not bad to become a educatee of Protagoras (Protagoras, 312a). Hippocrates is so eager to meet Protagoras that he wakes Socrates in the early hours of the morn, yet later concedes that he himself would be ashamed to exist known as a sophist by his beau citizens.

Plato depicts Protagoras also enlightened of the hostility and resentment engendered by his profession (Protagoras, 316c-e). Information technology is non surprising, Protagoras suggests, that foreigners who profess to be wise and persuade the wealthy youth of powerful cities to forsake their family and friends and consort with them would agitate suspicion. Indeed, Protagoras claims that the sophistic art is an ancient one, just that sophists of erstwhile, including poets such as Homer, Hesiod and Simonides, prophets, seers and even physical trainers, deliberately did not adopt the proper name for fear of persecution. Protagoras says that while he has adopted a strategy of openly professing to exist a sophist, he has taken other precautions – perhaps including his association with the Athenian full general Pericles – in order to secure his safety.

The low standing of the sophists in Athenian public stance does not stalk from a single source. No dubiousness suspicion of intellectuals among the many was a factor. New money and democratic decision-making, however, too constituted a threat to the conservative Athenian aloof establishment. This threatening social modify is reflected in the attitudes towards the concept of excellence or virtue (aret ē) alluded to in the summary above. Whereas in the Homeric epics aret ē generally denotes the strength and courage of a existent homo, in the 2nd half of the fifth century B.C.E. it increasingly became associated with success in public affairs through rhetorical persuasion.

In the context of Athenian political life of the late fifth century B.C.Eastward. the importance of skill in persuasive speech, or rhetoric, cannot exist underestimated. The development of democracy made mastery of the spoken give-and-take non but a precondition of political success but also indispensable as a form of self-defence in the event that i was bailiwick to a lawsuit. The sophists appropriately answered a growing demand amidst the young and ambitious. Meno, an ambitious educatee of Gorgias, says that the aret ē – and hence function – of a man is to rule over people, that is, manage his public affairs so as to benefit his friends and harm his enemies (73c-d). This is a long-standing ideal, but one best realised in democratic Athens through rhetoric. Rhetoric was thus the core of the sophistic education (Protagoras, 318e), fifty-fifty if about sophists professed to teach a broader range of subjects.

Suspicion towards the sophists was as well informed by their departure from the aloof model of education (paideia). Since Homeric Greece, paideia had been the preoccupation of the ruling nobles and was based effectually a set of moral precepts befitting an aristocratic warrior course. The business model of the sophists presupposed that aret ē could be taught to all free citizens, a claim that Protagoras implicitly defends in his neat speech communication regarding the origins of justice. The sophists were thus a threat to the condition quo because they made an indiscriminate promise – assuming chapters to pay fees – to provide the young and ambitious with the ability to prevail in public life.

Ane could therefore loosely ascertain sophists as paid teachers of aret ē, where the latter is understood in terms of the chapters to attain and practice political ability through persuasive speech communication. This is simply a starting point, however, and the broad and meaning intellectual accomplishment of the sophists, which we will consider in the following 2 sections, has led some to ask whether information technology is possible or desirable to attribute them with a unique method or outlook that would serve as a unifying feature while too differentiating them from philosophers.

Scholarship in the nineteenth century and across has often fastened on method equally a way of differentiating Socrates from the sophists. For Henry Sidgwick (1872, 288-307), for example, whereas Socrates employed a question-and-answer method in search of the truth, the sophists gave long epideictic or display speeches for the purposes of persuasion. It seems difficult to maintain a articulate methodical differentiation on this basis, given that Gorgias and Protagoras both claimed proficiency in short speeches and that Socrates engages in long eloquent speeches – many in mythical form – throughout the Platonic dialogues. It is moreover simply misleading to say that the sophists were in all cases unconcerned with truth, as to assert the relativity of truth is itself to make a truth claim. A further consideration is that Socrates is guilty of beguiling reasoning in many of the Platonic dialogues, although this point is less relevant if we assume that Socrates' logical errors are unintentional.

G.B. Kerferd (1981a) has proposed a more nuanced ready of methodological criteria to differentiate Socrates from the sophists. Co-ordinate to Kerferd, the sophists employed eristic and antilogical methods of statement, whereas Socrates disdained the quondam and saw the latter as a necessary but incomplete pace on the fashion towards dialectic. Plato uses the term eristic to denote the practice – information technology is not strictly speaking a method – of seeking victory in statement without regard for the truth. We find a representation of eristic techniques in Plato'south dialogue Euthydemus, where the brothers Euthydemus and Dionysiodorous deliberately use egregiously beguiling arguments for the purpose of contradicting and prevailing over their opponent. Antilogic is the method of proceeding from a given argument, commonly that offered past an opponent, towards the establishment of a contrary or contradictory argument in such a way that the opponent must either abandon his first position or take both positions. This method of argumentation was employed by most of the sophists, and examples are found in the works of Protagoras and Retort.

Kerferd's claim that we can distinguish between philosophy and sophistry by appealing to dialectic remains problematic, nonetheless. In what are unremarkably taken to be the "early" Platonic dialogues, we find Socrates' employing a dialectical method of refutation referred to as the elenchus. As Nehamas has argued (1990), while the elenchus is distinguishable from eristic because of its concern with the truth, it is harder to differentiate from antilogic because its success is ever dependent upon the capacity of interlocutors to defend themselves against refutation in a item example. In Plato's "middle" and "later" dialogues, on the other hand, according to Nehamas' interpretation, Plato assembly dialectic with knowledge of the forms, but this seemingly involves an epistemological and metaphysical delivery to a transcendent ontology that most philosophers, then and now, would be reluctant to uphold.

More recent attempts to explain what differentiates philosophy from sophistry have accordingly tended to focus on a difference in moral purpose or in terms of choices for different means fashion of life, as Aristotle elegantly puts it (Metaphysics 4, 2, 1004b24-5). Section four will return to the question of whether this is the all-time manner to think nearly the distinction between philosophy and sophistry. Earlier this, still, information technology is useful to sketch the biographies and interests of the most prominent sophists and also consider some common themes in their thought.

two. The Sophists

a. Protagoras

Protagoras of Abdera (c. 490-420 B.C.E.) was the nigh prominent member of the sophistic motility and Plato reports he was the beginning to charge fees using that title (Protagoras, 349a). Despite his animus towards the sophists, Plato depicts Protagoras as quite a sympathetic and dignified figure.

One of the more than intriguing aspects of Protagoras' life and piece of work is his association with the swell Athenian general and statesman Pericles (c. 495-429 B.C.E.). Pericles, who was the most influential statesman in Athens for more than 30 years, including the kickoff two years of the Peloponnesian War, seems to have held a high regard for philosophers and sophists, and Protagoras in particular, entrusting him with the role of drafting laws for the Athenian foundation city of Thurii in 444 B.C.E.

From a philosophical perspective, Protagoras is most famous for his relativistic account of truth – in particular the claim that 'human being is the measure of all things' – and his agnosticism apropos the Gods. The offset topic will be discussed in section 3b. Protagoras' faithlessness is famously articulated in the claim that 'apropos the gods I am not in a position to know either that (or how) they are or that (or how) they are non, or what they are like in appearance; for in that location are many things that forestall knowledge, the obscurity of the thing and the brevity of man life' (DK, 80B4). This seems to express a class of religious faithlessness not completely foreign to educated Athenian stance. Despite this, according to tradition, Protagoras was convicted of impiety towards the end of his life. As a event, so the story goes, his books were burnt and he drowned at ocean while departing Athens. It is perchance meaning in this context that Protagoras seems to have been the source of the sophistic claim to 'make the weaker statement defeat the stronger' parodied past Aristophanes.

Plato suggests that Protagoras sought to differ his educational offer from that of other sophists, such as Hippias, by concentrating upon instruction in aret ē in the sense of political virtue rather than specialised studies such as astronomy and mathematics (Protagoras, 318e).

Apart from his works Truth and On the Gods, which deal with his relativistic business relationship of truth and faithlessness respectively, Diogenes Laertius says that Protagoras wrote the following books: Antilogies, Art of Eristics, Imperative, On Appetite, On Incorrect Human Actions, On those in Hades, On Sciences, On Virtues, On Wrestling, On the Original State of Things and Trial over a Fee.

b. Gorgias

Gorgias of Leontini (c.485 – c.390 B.C.E.) is by and large considered equally a member of the sophistic movement, despite his disavowal of the capacity to teach aret ē (Meno, 96c). The major focus of Gorgias was rhetoric and given the importance of persuasive speaking to the sophistic education, and his acceptance of fees, it is appropriate to consider him alongside other famous sophists for present purposes.

Gorgias visited Athens in 427 B.C.E. every bit the leader of an diplomatic mission from Leontini with the successful intention of persuading the Athenians to make an alliance against Syracuse. He travelled extensively around Greece, earning large sums of money by giving lessons in rhetoric and epideictic speeches.

Plato's Gorgias depicts the rhetorician as something of a celebrity, who either does not have well thought out views on the implications of his expertise, or is reluctant to share them, and who denies his responsibility for the unjust use of rhetorical skill past errant students. Although Gorgias presents himself as moderately upstanding, the dramatic structure of Plato's dialogue suggests that the defence of injustice by Polus and the entreatment to the natural right of the stronger past Callicles are partly grounded in the conceptual presuppositions of Gorgianic rhetoric.

Gorgias' original contribution to philosophy is sometimes disputed, but the fragments of his works On Not Being or Nature and Helen – discussed in detail in section 3c – feature intriguing claims concerning the power of rhetorical voice communication and a style of argumentation reminiscent of Parmenides and Zeno. Gorgias is also credited with other orations and encomia and a technical treatise on rhetoric titled At the Correct Moment in Fourth dimension.

c. Antiphon

The biographical details surrounding Antiphon the sophist (c. 470-411 B.C.) are unclear – ane unresolved issue is whether he should be identified with Antiphon of Rhamnus (a statesman and instructor of rhetoric who was a fellow member of the oligarchy which held ability in Athens briefly in 411 B.C.E.). However, since the publication of fragments from his On Truth in the early twentieth century he has been regarded every bit a major representative of the sophistic movement.

On Truth, which features a range of positions and counterpositions on the human relationship between nature and convention (see section 3a below), is sometimes considered an important text in the history of political thought considering of its declared advocacy of egalitarianism:

Those born of illustrious fathers we respect and honour, whereas those who come from an undistinguished house we neither respect nor honour. In this nosotros behave like barbarians towards ane another. For past nature we all every bit, both barbarians and Greeks, have an entirely similar origin: for information technology is fitting to fulfil the natural satisfactions which are necessary to all men: all accept the ability to fulfil these in the aforementioned way, and in all this none of the states is different either as barbarian or as Greek; for we all breathe into the air with mouth and nostrils and we all eat with the hands (quoted in Untersteiner, 1954).

Whether this statement should exist taken as expressing the actual views of Antiphon, or rather equally part of an antilogical presentation of opposing views on justice remains an open question, as does whether such a position rules out the identification of Retort the sophist with the oligarchical Antiphon of Rhamnus.

d. Hippias

The verbal dates for Hippias of Elis are unknown, but scholars more often than not presume that he lived during the aforementioned period as Protagoras. Whereas Plato'due south depictions of Protagoras – and to a lesser extent Gorgias – bespeak a modicum of respect, he presents Hippias as a comic effigy who is obsessed with money, pompous and confused.

Hippias is best known for his polymathy (DK 86A14). His areas of expertise seem to have included astronomy, grammar, history, mathematics, music, poesy, prose, rhetoric, painting and sculpture. Like Gorgias and Prodicus, he served as an administrator for his home city. His work as a historian, which included compiling lists of Olympic victors, was invaluable to Thucydides and subsequent historians every bit it allowed for a more than precise dating of past events. In mathematics he is attributed with the discovery of a bend – the quadratrix – used to trisect an bending.

In terms of his philosophical contribution, Kerferd has suggested, on the footing of Plato'south Hippias Major (301d-302b), that Hippias advocated a theory that classes or kinds of thing are dependent on a existence that traverses them. It is hard to brand much sense of this alleged doctrine on the ground of available evidence. As suggested above, Plato depicts Hippias as philosophically shallow and unable to go on up with Socrates in dialectical discussion.

e. Prodicus

Prodicus of Ceos lived during roughly the aforementioned flow as Protagoras and Hippias. He is best known for his subtle distinctions betwixt the meanings of words. He is thought to have written a treatise titled On the Definiteness of Names.

Plato gives an amusing account of Prodicus' method in the following passage of the Protagoras:

Prodicus spoke up next: … 'those who attend discussions such as this ought to heed impartially, but not every bit, to both interlocutors. There is a distinction hither. We ought to listen impartially merely not divide our attending every bit: More should go to the wiser speaker and less to the more than unlearned … In this mode our coming together would accept a most attractive turn, for you, the speakers, would and then nearly surely earn the respect, rather than the praise, of those listening to you. For respect is guilelessly inherent in the souls of listeners, just praise is all as well often merely a deceitful verbal expression. And then, too, we, your audience, would exist most cheered, but not pleased, for to exist cheered is to larn something, to participate in some intellectual activity; simply to be pleased has to do with eating or experiencing some other pleasure in the body' (337a-c).

Prodicus' epideictic speech, The Option of Heracles, was singled out for praise by Xenophon (Memorabilia, 2.one.21-34) and in add-on to his private instruction he seems to have served as an administrator for Ceos (the birthplace of Simonides) on several occasions.

Socrates, although perhaps with some degree of irony, was fond of calling himself a student of Prodicus (Protagoras, 341a; Meno, 96d).

f. Thrasymachus

Thrasymachus was a well-known rhetorician in Athens in the latter part of the fifth century B.C.Eastward., but our only surviving record of his views is contained in Plato's Cleitophon and Book One of The Republic. He is depicted as brash and aggressive, with views on the nature of justice that will exist examined in department 3a.

3. Major Themes of Sophistic Thought

a. Nature and Convention

The distinction between physis (nature) and nomos (custom, police, convention) was a key theme in Greek thought in the 2d half of the 5th century B.C.E. and is especially important for agreement the work of the sophists. Before turning to sophistic considerations of these concepts and the distinction betwixt them, information technology is worth sketching the pregnant of the Greek terms.

Aristotle defines physis as 'the substance of things which have in themselves every bit such a source of movement' (Metaphysics, 1015a13-15). The term physis is closely connected with the Greek verb to abound (phu ō) and the dynamic attribute of physis reflects the view that the nature of things is establish in their origins and internal principles of change. Some of the Ionian thinkers now referred to as presocratics, including Thales and Heraclitus, used the term physis for reality equally a whole, or at to the lowest degree its underlying material constituents, referring to the investigation of nature in this context as historia (research) rather than philosophy.

The term nomos refers to a wide range of normative concepts extending from customs and conventions to positive law. It would be misleading to regard the term equally referring only to capricious homo conventions, every bit Heraclitus' appeal to the distinction between human nomoi and the one divine nomos (DK 22B2 and 114) makes clear. All the same, increased travel, as exemplified by the histories of Herodotus, led to a greater understanding of the broad assortment of customs, conventions and laws among communities in the ancient world. This recognition sets up the possibility of a dichotomy betwixt what is unchanging and co-ordinate to nature and what is merely a product of arbitrary homo convention.

The dichotomy between physis and nomos seems to take been something of a commonplace of sophistic idea and was appealed to by Protagoras and Hippias amid others. Perhaps the near instructive sophistic account of the distinction, however, is establish in Retort's fragment On Truth.

Retort applies the distinction to notions of justice and injustice, arguing that the bulk of things which are considered just according to nomos are in straight disharmonize with nature and hence not truly or naturally just (DK 87 A44). The basic thrust of Antiphon's argument is that laws and conventions are designed as a constraint upon our natural pursuit of pleasure. In a passage suggestive of the word on justice early on in Plato's Republic, Antiphon as well asserts that one should employ justice to one's advantage by regarding the laws every bit of import when witnesses are present, but disregarding them when one tin get away with it. Although these arguments may be construed as part of an antilogical exercise on nature and convention rather than prescriptions for a life of prudent immorality, they are consequent with views on the relation between man nature and justice suggested past Plato'due south delineation of Callicles and Thrasymachus in the Gorgias and Republic respectively.

Callicles, a immature Athenian aristocrat who may be a existent historical figure or a creation of Plato'south imagination, was non a sophist; indeed he expresses disdain for them (Gorgias, 520a). His account of the relation between physis and nomos nonetheless owes a debt to sophistic thought. Co-ordinate to Callicles, Socrates' arguments in favour of the merits that it is better to suffer injustice than to commit injustice trade on a deliberate ambiguity in the term justice. Callicles argues that conventional justice is a kind of slave morality imposed by the many to constrain the desires of the superior few. What is just according to nature, past contrast, is seen by observing animals in nature and relations between political communities where it can be seen that the stiff prevail over the weak. Callicles himself takes this statement in the direction of a vulgar sensual hedonism motivated past the want to take more than others (pleonexia), but sensual hedonism equally such does not seem to be a necessary issue of his account of natural justice.

Although the sophist Thrasymachus does not apply the physis/nomos distinction in Book One of the Republic, his account of justice (338d-354c) belongs inside a like conceptual framework. Like Callicles, Thrasymachus accuses Socrates of deliberate deception in his arguments, specially in the claim the art of justice consists in a ruler looking afterwards their subjects. According to Thrasymachus, nosotros do better to think of the ruler/ruled relation in terms of a shepherd looking later his flock with a view to its eventual demise. Justice in conventional terms is but a naive business for the advantage of some other. From another more natural perspective, justice is the rule of the stronger, insofar every bit rulers establish laws which persuade the multitude that it is just for them to obey what is to the reward of the ruling few

An alternative, and more edifying, account of the relation betwixt physis and nomos is found in Protagoras' nifty speech (Protagoras, 320c-328d). According to Protagoras' myth, man was originally prepare forth by the gods into a violent state of nature reminiscent of that later described past Hobbes. Our condition improved when Zeus bestowed us with shame and justice; these enabled us to develop the skill of politics and hence civilized communal relations and virtue. Autonomously from supporting his argument that aret ē tin can be taught, this business relationship suggests a defence of nomos on the grounds that nature past itself is insufficient for the flourishing of human considered as a political animal.

b. Relativism

The primary source on sophistic relativism near cognition and/or truth is Protagoras' famous 'man is the measure out' statement. Estimation of Protagoras' thesis has ever been a matter of controversy. Caution is needed in particular against the temptation to read modern epistemological concerns into Protagoras' account and sophistic teaching on the relativity of truth more than generally.

Protagoras measure thesis is every bit follows:

A man is the measure of all things, of those things that are, that they are, and of those things that are not, that they are not (DK, 80B1).

There is virtually scholarly consensus that Protagoras is referring hither to each human being equally the measure out of what is rather than 'humankind' as such, although the Greek term for 'human' –h ō anthr ō pos– certainly does not rule out the second estimation. Plato's Theaetetus (152a), however, suggests the first reading and I volition assume its correctness here. On this reading we can regard Protagoras as asserting that if the wind, for instance, feels (or seems) cold to me and feels (or seems) warm to you, and then the wind is cold for me and is warm for you.

Another interpretative issue concerns whether we should construe Protagoras' statement every bit primarily ontological or epistemological in intent. Scholarship past Kahn, Owen and Kerferd among others suggests that, while the Greeks lacked a clear distinction between existential and predicative uses of 'to exist', they tended to treat existential uses as brusque for predicative uses.

Having sketched some of the interpretative difficulties surrounding Protagoras' statement, we are still left with at least iii possible readings (Kerferd, 1981a, 86). Protagoras could be asserting that (i) there is no mind-independent air current at all, but but private subjective winds (two) in that location is a wind that exists independently of my perception of it, but it is in itself neither cold nor warm every bit these qualities are private (iii) at that place is a wind that exists independently of my perception of it and this is both cold and warm insofar as two qualities tin inhere in the same mind-independent 'entity'.

All iii interpretations are live options, with (i) possibly the least plausible. Whatsoever the verbal import of Protagoras' relativism, however, the following passage from the Theaetetus suggests that it was besides extended to the political and ethical realm:

Whatever in whatever particular city is considered just and admirable is but and admirable in that urban center, for so long as the convention remains in place (167c).

1 difficulty this passage raises is that while Protagoras asserted that all behavior are equally true, he also maintained that some are superior to others because they are more subjectively fulfilling for those who concur them. Protagoras thus seems to want it both ways, insofar as he removes an objective criterion of truth while also asserting that some subjective states are improve than others. His appeal to ameliorate and worse beliefs could, however, be taken to refer to the persuasiveness and pleasure induced past certain beliefs and speeches rather than their objective truth.

The other major source for sophistic relativism is the Dissoi Logoi, an undated and anonymous example of Protagorean antilogic. In the Dissoi Logoi we detect competing arguments on five theses, including whether the practiced and the bad are the same or different, and a series of examples of the relativity of different cultural practices and laws. Overall the Dissoi Logoi can be taken to uphold not only the relativity of truth but also what Barney (2006, 89) has called the variability thesis: any is expert in some qualified way is as well bad in another respect and the same is the case for a wide range of opposite predicates.

c. Linguistic communication and Reality

Understandably given their educational program, the sophists placed bully accent upon the power of speech (logos). Logos is a notoriously difficult term to translate and tin refer to idea and that well-nigh which nosotros speak and think every bit well as rational speech or language. The sophists were interested in particular with the function of human discourse in the shaping of reality. Rhetoric was the centrepiece of the curriculum, only literary interpretation of the work of poets was too a staple of sophistic education. Some philosophical implications of the sophistic concern with speech are considered in section iv, but in the current section it is instructive to concentrate on Gorgias' account of the ability of rhetorical logos.

The extant fragments attributed to the historical Gorgias signal non but scepticism towards essential existence and our epistemic access to this putative realm, just an assertion of the omnipotence of persuasive logos to brand the natural and practical world conform to human desires. Reporting upon Gorgias' speech Nigh the Nonexistent or on Nature, Sextus says that the rhetorician, while adopting a different approach from that of Protagoras, besides eliminated the criterion (DK, 82B3). The elimination of the criterion refers to the rejection of a standard that would enable united states to distinguish clearly between cognition and opinion well-nigh existence and nature. Whereas Protagoras asserted that man is the measure of all things, Gorgias concentrated upon the status of truth about existence and nature as a discursive structure.

Nigh the Nonexistent or on Nature transgresses the injunction of Parmenides that one cannot say of what is that information technology is non. Employing a series of conditional arguments in the manner of Zeno, Gorgias asserts that nada exists, that if it did exist it could not be apprehended, and if it was apprehended it could not be articulated in logos. The elaborate parody displays the paradoxical character of attempts to disclose the true nature of beings through logos:

For that past which nosotros reveal is logos, but logos is not substances and existing things. Therefore we practice not reveal existing things to our comrades, but logos, which is something other than substances (DK, 82B3)

Fifty-fifty if noesis of beings was possible, its manual in logos would ever be distorted by the rift betwixt substances and our apprehension and communication of them. Gorgias also suggests, even more provocatively, that insofar every bit speech is the medium past which humans articulate their experience of the world, logos is not evocative of the external, simply rather the external is what reveals logos. An understanding of logos most nature as constitutive rather than descriptive here supports the exclamation of the omnipotence of rhetorical expertise. Gorgias' account suggests at that place is no knowledge of nature sub specie aeternitatis and our grasp of reality is ever mediated by discursive interpretations, which, in turn, implies that truth cannot be separated from human interests and power claims.

In the Encomium to Helen Gorgias refers to logos as a powerful master (DK, 82B11). If humans had knowledge of the past, present or time to come they would not be compelled to adopt unpredictable stance as their counsellor. The endless contention of astronomers, politicians and philosophers is taken to demonstrate that no logos is definitive. Human ignorance well-nigh non-existent truth tin can thus be exploited by rhetorical persuasion insofar as humans desire the illusion of certainty imparted by the spoken word:

The effect of logos upon the status of the soul is comparable to the power of drugs over the nature of bodies. For just as different drugs dispel different secretions from the body, and some bring an end to disease and others to life, so too in the case of logoi, some distress, others delight, some cause fearfulness, others make hearers assuming, and some drug and bewitch the soul with a kind of evil persuasion (DK, 82B11).

All who have persuaded people, Gorgias says, practise and then past moulding a fake logos. While other forms of power require force, logos makes all its willing slave.

This account of the relation between persuasive oral communication, knowledge, opinion and reality is broadly consistent with Plato'due south depiction of the rhetorician in the Gorgias. Both Protagoras' relativism and Gorgias' business relationship of the omnipotence of logos are suggestive of what nosotros moderns might call a deflationary epistemic anti-realism.

4. The Distinction Between Philosophy and Sophistry

The distinction between philosophy and sophistry is in itself a hard philosophical problem. This closing section examines the endeavour of Plato to establish a clear line of demarcation between philosophy and sophistry.

As alluded to above, the terms 'philosopher' and 'sophist' were disputed in the fifth and fourth century B.C.E., the subject of contention between rival schools of thought. Histories of philosophy tend to begin with the Ionian 'physicist' Thales, but the presocratics referred to the activity they were engaged in as historia (enquiry) rather than philosophia and although it may have some validity as a historical projection, the notion that philosophy begins with Thales derives from the mid nineteenth century. It was Plato who first clearly and consistently refers to the activity of philosophia and much of what he has to say is best understood in terms of an explicit or implicit contrast with the rival schools of the sophists and Isocrates (who also claimed the title philosophia for his rhetorical educational program).

The related questions equally to what a sophist is and how we can distinguish the philosopher from the sophist were taken very seriously past Plato. He also acknowledges the difficulty inherent in the pursuit of these questions and it is perhaps revealing that the dialogue dedicated to the chore, Sophist, culminates in a discussion about the being of non-being. Socrates converses with sophists in Euthydemus, Hippias Major, Hippias Small-scale, Gorgias, Protagoras and the Commonwealth and discusses sophists at length in the Amends, Sophist, Statesman and Theaetetus. Information technology can thus be argued that the search for the sophist and distinction betwixt philosophy and sophistry are not merely central themes in the Platonic dialogues, but constitutive of the very idea and exercise of philosophy, at least in its original sense as articulated past Plato.

This point has been recognised by contempo poststructuralist thinkers such equally Jacques Derrida and Jean Francois-Lyotard in the context of their projection to place in question fundamental presuppositions of the Western philosophical tradition deriving from Plato. Derrida attacks the interminable trial prosecuted by Plato against the sophists with a view to exhuming 'the conceptual monuments marker out the battle lines between philosophy and sophistry' (1981, 106). Lyotard views the sophists as in possession of unique insight into the sense in which discourses near what is just cannot transcend the realm of opinion and pragmatic language games (1985, 73-83).

The prospects for establishing a articulate methodological dissever between philosophy and sophistry are poor. Apart from the considerations mentioned in department 1, information technology would be misleading to say that the sophists were unconcerned with truth or genuine theoretical investigation and Socrates is conspicuously guilty of beguiling reasoning in many of the Platonic dialogues. In the Sophist, in fact, Plato implies that the Socratic technique of dialectical refutation represents a kind of 'noble sophistry' (Sophist, 231b).

This in large role explains why contemporary scholarship on the distinction betwixt philosophy and sophistry has tended to focus on a difference in moral character. Nehamas, for example, has argued that 'Socrates did not differ from the sophists in method simply in overall purpose' (1990, thirteen). Nehamas relates this overall purpose to the Socratic elenchus, suggesting that Socrates' disavowal of cognition and of the capacity to teach aretē distances him from the sophists. However, this fashion of demarcating Socrates' practice from that of his sophistic counterparts, Nehamas argues, cannot justify the later Platonic distinction between philosophy and sophistry, insofar as Plato forfeited the right to uphold the distinction once he developed a noun philosophical educational activity, that is, the theory of forms.

There is no doubt much truth in the claim that Plato and Aristotle depict the philosopher as pursuing a dissimilar fashion of life than the sophist, just to say that Plato defines the philosopher either through a departure in moral purpose, equally in the case of Socrates, or a metaphysical presumption regarding the existence of transcendent forms, as in his later work, does non in itself adequately characterise Plato's critique of his sophistic contemporaries. One time we attend to Plato's own handling of the distinction between philosophy and sophistry two themes quickly go articulate: the mercenary character of the sophists and their overestimation of the power of speech communication. For Plato, at least, these 2 aspects of the sophistic teaching tell us something about the persona of the sophist equally the embodiment of a distinctive mental attitude towards knowledge.

The fact that the sophists taught for profit may not seem objectionable to modern readers; nearly present-day academy professors would exist reluctant to teach pro bono. It is clearly a major issue for Plato, even so. Plato can barely mention the sophists without contemptuous reference to the mercenary aspect of their trade: specially revealing examples of Plato's disdain for sophistic money-making and avarice are plant at Apology 19d, Euthydemus 304b-c, Hippias Major 282b-eastward, Protagoras 312c-d and Sophist 222d-224d, and this is not an exhaustive list. Part of the issue here is no uncertainty Plato'south commitment to a way of life dedicated to knowledge and contemplation. It is significant that students in the University, arguably the first higher education institution, were not required to pay fees. This is just office of the story, however.

A adept starting point is to consider the etymology of the term philosophia as suggested by the Phaedrus and Symposium. After completing his palinode in the Phaedrus, Socrates expresses the hope that he never be deprived of his 'erotic' art. Whereas the speechwriter Lysias presents erōs (want, love) every bit an unseemly waste of expenditure (Phaedrus, 257a), in his later speech Socrates demonstrates how erōs impels the soul to rise towards the forms. The followers of Zeus, or philosophy, Socrates suggests, educate the object of their erōs to imitate and partake in the ways of the God. Similarly, in the Symposium, Socrates refers to an exception to his ignorance. Approving of the suggestion by Phaedrus that the drinking party eulogise erōs, Socrates states that ta erōtika (the erotic things) are the but subject area concerning which he would claim to possess rigorous knowledge (Symposium, 177 d-due east). When it is his plough to deliver a speech communication, Socrates laments his incapacity to compete with the Gorgias-influenced rhetoric of Agathon earlier delivering Diotima's lessons on erōs, represented as a daimonion or semi-divine intermediary between the mortal and the divine. Erōs is thus presented every bit analogous to philosophy in its etymological sense, a striving later wisdom or completion that can only be temporarily fulfilled in this life past contemplation of the forms of the beautiful and the good (204a-b). The philosopher is someone who strives afterward wisdom – a friend or lover of wisdom – not someone who possesses wisdom as a finished product, as the sophists claimed to practice and every bit their proper name suggests.

Plato'south emphasis upon philosophy as an 'erotic' activity of striving for wisdom, rather than as a finished land of completed wisdom, largely explains his distaste for sophistic money-making. The sophists, according to Plato, considered knowledge to exist a ready-made product that could be sold without bigotry to all comers. The Theages, a Socratic dialogue whose authorship some scholars have disputed, simply which expresses sentiments consistent with other Platonic dialogues, makes this betoken with particular clarity. The farmer Demodokos has brought his son, Theages, who is desirous of wisdom, to Socrates. Equally Socrates questions his potential educatee regarding what sort of wisdom he seeks, information technology becomes evident that Theages seeks power in the city and influence over other men. Since Theages is looking for political wisdom, Socrates refers him to the statesmen and the sophists. Disavowing his ability to compete with the expertise of Gorgias and Prodicus in this respect, Socrates nonetheless admits his knowledge of the erotic things, a subject about which he claims to know more than than any man who has come earlier or indeed whatsoever of those to come (Theages, 128b). In response to the suggestion that he study with a sophist, Theages reveals his intention to become a student of Socrates. Perhaps reluctant to accept on an unpromising student, Socrates insists that he must follow the commands of his daimonion, which will make up one's mind whether those associating with him are capable of making any progress (Theages, 129c). The dialogue ends with an agreement that all parties make trial of the daimonion to see whether information technology permits of the association.

One demand only follow the suggestion of the Symposium that erōs is a daimonion to encounter that Socratic education, as presented by Plato, is concomitant with a kind of 'erotic' business organisation with the cute and the adept, considered every bit natural in contrast to the purely conventional. Whereas the sophists accept pupils indiscriminately, provided they have the money to pay, Socrates is oriented by his desire to cultivate the beautiful and the expert in promising natures. In brusque, the divergence between Socrates and his sophistic contemporaries, every bit Xenophon suggests, is the difference betwixt a lover and a prostitute. The sophists, for Xenophon'due south Socrates, are prostitutes of wisdom because they sell their wares to anyone with the chapters to pay (Memorabilia, I.6.13). This – somewhat paradoxically – accounts for Socrates' shamelessness in comparison with his sophistic contemporaries, his preparedness to follow the argument wherever it leads. Past contrast, Protagoras and Gorgias are shown, in the dialogues that carry their names, equally vulnerable to the conventional opinions of the paying fathers of their pupils, a weakness contributing to their refutation. The sophists are thus characterised past Plato as subordinating the pursuit of truth to worldly success, in a fashion that perhaps calls to mind the activities of contemporary advertizing executives or management consultants.

The overestimation of the ability of human being speech is the other theme that emerges clearly from Plato'due south (and Aristotle's) critique of the sophists. In the Sophist, Plato says that dialectic – division and collection according to kinds – is the cognition possessed past the free man or philosopher (Sophist, 253c). Here Plato reintroduces the difference between truthful and false rhetoric, alluded to in the Phaedrus, according to which the quondam presupposes the capacity to see the one in the many (Phaedrus, 266b). Plato's claim is that the capacity to split up and synthesise in accordance with one form is required for the true expertise of logos. Any else 1 makes of Plato'south account of our knowledge of the forms, it clearly involves the apprehension of a college level of beingness than sensory perception and speech. The philosopher, then, considers rational speech as oriented by a genuine agreement of being or nature. The sophist, by contrast, is said by Plato to occupy the realm of falsity, exploiting the difficulty of dialectic by producing discursive semblances, or phantasms, of true being (Sophist, 234c). The sophist uses the power of persuasive speech to construct or create images of the world and is thus a kind of 'enchanter' and imitator.

This aspect of Plato's critique of sophistry seems specially apposite in regard to Gorgias' rhetoric, both as institute in the Ideal dialogue and the extant fragments attributed to the historical Gorgias. In response to Socratic questioning, Gorgias asserts that rhetoric is an all-comprehending power that holds nether itself all of the other activities and occupations (Gorgias, 456a). He later on claims that it is concerned with the greatest good for man, namely those speeches that allow one to accomplish freedom and rule over others, especially, but non exclusively, in political settings (452d). As suggested above, in the context of Athenian public life the capacity to persuade was a precondition of political success. For present purposes, nonetheless, the primal point is that liberty and dominion over others are both forms of ability: respectively power in the sense of liberty or capacity to do something, which suggests the absenteeism of relevant constraints, and ability in the sense of dominion over others. Gorgias is suggesting that rhetoric, every bit the expertise of persuasive speech, is the source of power in a quite comprehensive sense and that power is 'the skillful'. What we have hither is an assertion of the omnipotence of speech, at the very least in relation to the determination of human affairs.

The Socratic position, as becomes clear later in the discussion with Polus (466d-eastward), and is likewise suggested in Meno (88c-d) and Euthydemus (281d-due east), is that power without noesis of the good is not genuinely good. Without such cognition non just 'external' goods, such as wealth and health, not only the areas of expertise that enable one to attain such so-called appurtenances, simply the very capacity to attain them is either of no value or harmful. This in large part explains the and so-called Socratic paradox that virtue is noesis.

Plato's critique of the sophists' overestimation of the power of speech communication should not exist conflated with his commitment to the theory of the forms. For Plato, the sophist reduces thinking to a kind of making: past asserting the omnipotence of human speech the sophist pays bereft regard to the natural limits upon human knowledge and our status equally seekers rather than possessors of noesis (Sophist, 233d). This critique of the sophists does perhaps crave a minimal commitment to a stardom between appearance and reality, just it is an oversimplification to propose that Plato'south stardom between philosophy and sophistry rests upon a substantive metaphysical theory, in large function because our knowledge of the forms for Plato is itself inherently ethical. Plato, like his Socrates, differentiates the philosopher from the sophist primarily through the virtues of the philosopher's soul (McKoy, 2008). Socrates is an embodiment of the moral virtues, only love of the forms also has consequences for the philosopher's character.

There is a further ethical and political aspect to the Platonic and Aristotelian critique of the sophists' overestimation of the power of speech. In Book Ten of Nicomachean Ethics, Aristotle suggests that the sophists tended to reduce politics to rhetoric (1181a12-15) and overemphasised the part that could be played past rational persuasion in the political realm. Role of Aristotle'south betoken is that at that place is an element to living well that transcends speech communication. As Hadot eloquently puts information technology, citing Greek and Roman sources, 'traditionally people who adult an apparently philosophical discourse without trying to live their lives in accordance with their discourse, and without their soapbox emanating from their life experience, were called sophists' (2004, 174).

The testimony of Xenophon, a Greek general and man of activity, is instructive here. In his treatise on hunting, (Cynēgeticus, thirteen.1-9), Xenophon commends Socratic over sophistic pedagogy in aretē, not just on the grounds that the sophists hunt the immature and rich and are deceptive, but too because they are men of words rather than activeness. The importance of consistency between one'southward words and deportment if one is to exist truly virtuous is a commonplace of Greek thought, and this is ane of import respect in which the sophists, at least from the Platonic-Aristotelian perspective, fell short.

I might think that a denial of Plato's demarcation between philosophy and sophistry remains well-motivated but because the historical sophists fabricated genuine contributions to philosophy. But this does not entail the illegitimacy of Plato'southward distinction. Once we recognise that Plato is pointing primarily to a fundamental ethical orientation relating to the respective personas of the philosopher and sophist, rather than a methodological or purely theoretical distinction, the tension dissolves. This is non to deny that the ethical orientation of the sophist is likely to lead to a certain kind of philosophising, namely one which attempts to master nature, human and external, rather than sympathize it as it is.

Sophistry for Socrates, Plato and Aristotle represents a choice for a certain mode of life, embodied in a detail attitude towards knowledge which views it every bit a finished product to be transmitted to all comers. Plato's distinction betwixt philosophy and sophistry is not merely an capricious viewpoint in a dispute over naming rights, but is rather based upon a central difference in ethical orientation. Neither is this orientation reducible to business organisation with truth or the cogency of ane'due south theoretical constructs, although it is non unrelated to these. Where the philosopher differs from the sophist is in terms of the choice for a way of life that is oriented by the pursuit of cognition as a good in itself while remaining cognisant of the necessarily provisional nature of this pursuit.

5. References and Further Reading

Translations are from the Cooper collected works edition of Plato and the Sprague edition of the sophists unless otherwise indicated. The reference listing below is restricted to a few basic sources; readers interested to learn more than about the sophists are brash to consult the excellent overviews past Barney (2006) and Kerferd (1981a) for a more comprehensive list of secondary literature.

a. Primary Sources

Aristophanes,Clouds, K.J. Dover (ed.), Oxford: Oxford University Press. 1970.
Barnes, J. (ed.). 1984.The Consummate Works of Aristotle, New Jersey: Princeton Academy Press.
Diels, H. 1951.Dice Fragmente der Vorsokratiker. Berlin: Weidman.
Cooper, J.M. (ed.). 1997.Plato: Complete Works. Indianopolis: Hackett.
Hudson-Williams. T. 1910.Theognis: Elegies and other elegies included in the Theognideansylloge. London: M.Bell.
Phillips, A.A. and Willcock, M.M (eds.). 1999.Xenophon &Arrian, On hunting (Kynēgetikos). Warminster: Aris& Phillips.
Sprague, R. 1972.The Older Sophists. South Carolina: University of South Carolina Press.
Xenophon,Memorabilia, trans. A.L. Bonnette, Ithaca: Cornell University Press. 1994.

b. Secondary Sources

Barney, R. 2006. 'The Sophistic Movement', in M.Fifty. Gill and P. Pellegrin (eds.),A Companion to Ancient Philosophy, 77-97. Oxford: Blackwell.
Gibert, J. 2003. 'The Sophists.' In C. Shields (ed.),The Blackwell Guide to Ancient Philosophy, 27-fifty. Oxford, Blackwell.
Guthrie, W.K.C. 1971.The Sophists. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Kerferd, G.B. 1981a.The Sophistic Move. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Kerferd, Grand.B. 1981b.The Sophists and their Legacy. Wiesbaden: Steiner.
Sidgwick, H. 1872. 'The Sophists'.Journal of Philology 4, 289.
Untersteiner, Chiliad. 1954.The Sophists.trans. Thou. Freeman. Oxford: Basil Blackwell.

c. Other Reading

Adkins, A. 1960.Merit and Responsibleness. Oxford: Clarendon Press.
Benardete, S. 1991. The Rhetoric of Morality and Philosophy. Chicago: University of Chicago Printing.
Bett, R. 1989. 'The Sophists and Relativism.'Phronesis 34, 139-69.
Bett, R. 2002. 'Is There a Sophistic Ethics?' Aboriginal Philosophy, 22, 235-62.
Derrida, J. 1981. Dissemination, trans. B. Johnson. Chicago: Academy of Chicago Press.
Grote, Thou. 1904. A History of Greece vol.7. London: John Murray.
Hadot, P. 2004. What is Ancient Philosophy? Cambridge: Cambridge Academy Press.
Harrison, E.Fifty. 1964. 'Was Gorgias a Sophist?' Phoenix vol. 18.three.
Hegel, G.W.F. 1995. Lectures on the History of Philosophy, trans. Due east.S. Haldane, Lincoln: University of Nebraska Printing (original work published 1840).
Irwin, T.H. 1995. 'Plato'south Objections to the Sophists'. In C.A. Powell (ed.), The Greek World, 568-87. London: Routledge.
Jarratt, S. 1991. Rereading the Sophists. Carbondale: Southern Illinois Press.
Kahn, Charles. 1983. 'Drama and Dialectic in Plato'southward Gorgias' in Julia Annas (ed.) Oxford Studies in Ancient Philosophy vol. 1. Oxford: Clarendon Press.
Kennedy, Thousand. 1963. The Art of Persuasion in Ancient Greece, London: Routledge and Kegan Paul.
Lyotard, J.F. and Thébaud, J-Fifty. 1985. Simply Gaming, trans. W. Godzich. Minneapolis: Academy of Minnesota Press.
McCoy, M. 2008. Plato on the Rhetoric of Philosophers and Sophists.Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Nehamas, A. 1990. 'Eristic, Antilogic, Sophistic, Dialectic: Plato's Demarcation of Philosophy from Sophistry'. History of Philosophy Quarterly, 7, 3-16.
Wardy, Robert. 1996. The Nascency of Rhetoric: Gorgias, Plato and their successors. London: Routledge.

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George Duke
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Deakin University
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Source: https://iep.utm.edu/sophists/