What do sophists do

Thrasymachus : Might makes right. The Sophists challenged and criticized and destroyed the foundations of traditions and the moral and social order and they put nothing in its place nor did they care to.

While Socrates looked for objective and eternal truths the Sophists were promoting ideas of relativism and subjectivism, wherein each person decides for him or herself what the true and the good and the beautiful are. This appealed to the mob, the crowds, the unthinking horde but it is not an approach that serves as the foundation for a common life. Conflicts are resolved through the use of power.

The Sophist held that might makes right. Society's demand for wisdom required more than what the Sophists offered. Socrates attempted another approach and in part due to the Sophists lost his life in his quest. Plato would be inspired by Socrates to take up the challenge and find answers to the questions that were most basic and most in need of answering in the quest after wisdom and the GOOD.

Socrates could debate with Sophists and do quite well. Socrates was skilled in the art of reasoning. In his exchanges with the Sophists Socrates developed his ability to think using a dialectical process. This methodology would be not only an important part of his legacy to Plato but to Western thought as well. There were other influences on both Socrates and Plato. Senior McLuhan Fellow at. The sophists were criticized mercilessly by Socrates.

These wandering teachers were the successors of the rhapsodes. Recently discovered fragments from the fifth and fourth centuries B. When material from more than one source was put together, interpreters were needed to translate anachronistic expressions and foreign words. Some of the earliest prose consists of their efforts to explain the meaning of traditional names and phrases in the old theogonies. Glosses, along with explanations of Homeric proper names and obscure words by "etymology," were developed, collected and transmitted by the rhapsodes.

They also taught techniques of oral presentation and public speaking in addition to the use of an "art of memory," which was said to have been invented by Simonides.

The early sophists wandered all over the Greek-speaking world. In contrast to his radical views on religion, the moral stance expressed here is thoroughly conventional. For information on other sophists see Guthrie , ch. The major sophists were considerable celebrities, and were active in public affairs.

The Protagoras captures the excitement which they engendered on arriving in a city, the cosmopolitan clientele who accompanied them and their associations with the rich and powerful. Some made a great deal of money; Hippias boasts Greater Hippias e of making, in a single visit to Sicily, more than a hundred and fifty minas, i.

But their wealth and celebrity status has to be set against the negative reaction they aroused in those of conservative views, e.

Anytus in Meno 89e—94e, who saw them to a considerable extent unfairly, as we have seen as subversive of morality and religion and a bad influence on the young. Consequently, his rehabilitation of Socrates leads him to contrast the genuine philosopher with the sophists, whom he depicts predominantly as charlatans. That hostile portrait was the historical foundation of the conception of the sophist as a dishonest argumentative trickster, a conception which remains the primary sense of the word in modern usage, but which considerably distorts what can be recovered of the historical reality.

Protagoras 2. Nomos and Phusis 3. Religion 4. Protagoras A key figure in the emergence of this new type of sophist was Protagoras of Abdera, a subject city of the Athenian empire on the north coast of the Aegean. Bibliography Texts Barnes, J. Cooper, J. Diels, H. English translations including additional material : R. Sprague ed. Graham ed. French translation including additional material : J. Pradeau ed. Didymus the Blind; papyrus fragments in M. Binder and L. Classen ed.

Euripides, Fragments. Volumes 7 and 8, ed. Collard and M. Gagarin, M. Laks, A. Texts and translations of the Sophists in vols. Pendrick, G. Mayhew, R. Contains a larger collection of texts than DK. Modern Discussions Barney, R. Zalta ed. Gill and P. Pellegrin eds. Bett, R. Brisson, L. Canto-Sperber ed. Broadie, S. Sedley ed. Classen, C. De Romilly, J. Decleva Caizzi, F. Flashar, H. Flashar ed. In democratic Athens of the latter fifth century B.

The most famous representatives of the sophistic movement are Protagoras, Gorgias, Antiphon, Hippias, Prodicus and Thrasymachus. The historical and philological difficulties confronting an interpretation of the sophists are significant.

The philosophical problem of the nature of sophistry is arguably even more formidable. Due in large part to the influence of Plato and Aristotle , the term sophistry has come to signify the deliberate use of fallacious reasoning, intellectual charlatanism and moral unscrupulousness.

It is, as the article explains, an oversimplification to think of the historical sophists in these terms because they made genuine 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. Perhaps because of the interpretative difficulties mentioned above, the sophists have been many things to many people.

For the utilitarian English classicist George Grote , the sophists were progressive thinkers who placed in question the prevailing morality of their time. More recent work by French theorists such as Jacques Derrida and Jean Francois-Lyotard suggests affinities between the sophists and postmodernism. This article provides a broad overview of the sophists, and indicates some of the central philosophical issues raised by their work.

Section 1 discusses the meaning of the term sophist. Section 2 surveys the individual contributions of the most famous sophists. Section 3 examines three themes that have often been taken as characteristic of sophistic thought: the distinction between nature and convention, relativism about knowledge and truth and the power of speech.

Finally, section 4 analyses attempts by Plato and others to establish a clear demarcation between philosophy and sophistry. 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 knowledge. Notably, the term sophia could be used to describe disingenuous cleverness long before the rise of the sophistic movement. Theognis, for example, writing in the sixth century B.

In the fifth century B. 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 institute of higher education headed up by the sophist Socrates. When he fails to learn the art of speaking in The Thinkery, Strepsiades persuades his initially reluctant son, Pheidippides, to accompany him.

Here they encounter 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 basis of a popular vote, the Weaker Argument prevails and leads Pheidippides into The Thinkery for an education in how to make the weaker argument defeat the stronger. Strepsiades later revisits The Thinkery and finds that Socrates has turned his son into a pale and useless intellectual.

In the first instance, it demonstrates that the distinction between Socrates and his sophistic counterparts was far from clear to their contemporaries. Although Socrates did not charge 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 citizen, of distinguishing his methods from theirs.

Thirdly, the attribution to the sophists of intellectual deviousness and moral dubiousness predates Plato and Aristotle. 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 city Meno , 91cc. Hippocrates is so eager to meet Protagoras that he wakes Socrates in the early hours of the morning, yet later concedes that he himself would be ashamed to be known as a sophist by his fellow citizens.

Plato depicts Protagoras as well aware of the hostility and resentment engendered by his profession Protagoras , c-e. It is not 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 arouse suspicion. Indeed, Protagoras claims that the sophistic art is an ancient one, but that sophists of old, including poets such as Homer, Hesiod and Simonides, prophets, seers and even physical trainers, deliberately did not adopt the name for fear of persecution.

Protagoras says that while he has adopted a strategy of openly professing to be a sophist, he has taken other precautions — perhaps including his association with the Athenian general Pericles — in order to secure his safety. The low standing of the sophists in Athenian public opinion does not stem from a single source.

No doubt suspicion of intellectuals among the many was a factor. New money and democratic decision-making, however, also constituted a threat to the conservative Athenian aristocratic establishment.

In the context of Athenian political life of the late fifth century B. The development of democracy made mastery of the spoken word not only a precondition of political success but also indispensable as a form of self-defence in the event that one was subject to a lawsuit. The sophists accordingly answered a growing need among the young and ambitious.

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 , e , even if most sophists professed to teach a broader range of subjects. Suspicion towards the sophists was also informed by their departure from the aristocratic model of education paideia. Since Homeric Greece, paideia had been the preoccupation of the ruling nobles and was based around a set of moral precepts befitting an aristocratic warrior class.

The sophists were thus a threat to the status quo because they made an indiscriminate promise — assuming capacity to pay fees — to provide the young and ambitious with the power to prevail in public life. This is only a starting point, however, and the broad and significant intellectual achievement of the sophists, which we will consider in the following two sections, has led some to ask whether it is possible or desirable to attribute them with a unique method or outlook that would serve as a unifying characteristic while also differentiating them from philosophers.

Scholarship in the nineteenth century and beyond has often fastened on method as a way of differentiating Socrates from the sophists. For Henry Sidgwick , , 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 clear 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. Kerferd a has proposed a more nuanced set of methodological criteria to differentiate Socrates from the sophists. According to Kerferd, the sophists employed eristic and antilogical methods of argument, whereas Socrates disdained the former and saw the latter as a necessary but incomplete step on the way towards dialectic. Plato uses the term eristic to denote the practice — it is not strictly speaking a method — of seeking victory in argument without regard for the truth.

Antilogic is the method of proceeding from a given argument, usually that offered by 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 accept both positions.

This method of argumentation was employed by most of the sophists, and examples are found in the works of Protagoras and Antiphon. As Nehamas has argued , 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 always dependent upon the capacity of interlocutors to defend themselves against refutation in a particular case.

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 ways way of life, as Aristotle elegantly puts it Metaphysics IV, 2, b Section 4 will return to the question of whether this is the best way to think about the distinction between philosophy and sophistry. Before this, however, it is useful to sketch the biographies and interests of the most prominent sophists and also consider some common themes in their thought.

Protagoras of Abdera c. Despite his animus towards the sophists, Plato depicts Protagoras as quite a sympathetic and dignified figure. Pericles, who was the most influential statesman in Athens for more than 30 years, including the first 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 B.

The first topic will be discussed in section 3b. This seems to express a form of religious agnosticism not completely foreign to educated Athenian opinion. Despite this, according to tradition, Protagoras was convicted of impiety towards the end of his life. As a consequence, so the story goes, his books were burnt and he drowned at sea while departing Athens. Gorgias of Leontini c. 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 B. He travelled extensively around Greece, earning large sums of money by giving lessons in rhetoric and epideictic speeches.

Gorgias is also credited with other orations and encomia and a technical treatise on rhetoric titled At the Right Moment in Time. The biographical details surrounding Antiphon the sophist c. In the fifth and early fourth centuries b. If you can imagine a professional who is a cross between a lawyer and a self-help coach, that would be a good description of a Sophist.

The Sophists put on public exhibitions for pay to teach Greek citizens how to succeed in their public and civic lives. They were constantly "on tour," and some became very famous.

Intellectually, the Sophists were a cross between pragmatists in the common sense use of this term, not the philosophical one and relativists. In our day, a pragmatist is someone practical who is motivated by results, rather than "highfalutin" principles or abstract theories. And a relativist is someone who believes that. There were many more Sophists in the changing Greek society of the fifth century b.