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. However, since the publication of fragments from his On Truth in the early twentieth century he has been regarded as a major representative of the sophistic movement.
On Truth , which features a range of positions and counterpositions on the relationship between nature and convention see section 3a below , is sometimes considered an important text in the history of political thought because of its alleged 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 we behave like barbarians towards one another. For by nature we all equally, both barbarians and Greeks, have an entirely similar origin: for it is fitting to fulfil the natural satisfactions which are necessary to all men: all have the ability to fulfil these in the same way, and in all this none of us 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, Whether this statement should be taken as expressing the actual views of Antiphon, or rather as 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 Antiphon the sophist with the oligarchical Antiphon of Rhamnus.
The exact dates for Hippias of Elis are unknown, but scholars generally assume that he lived during the same period as Protagoras. Hippias is best known for his polymathy DK 86A His areas of expertise seem to have included astronomy, grammar, history, mathematics, music, poetry, prose, rhetoric, painting and sculpture. Like Gorgias and Prodicus, he served as an ambassador for his home city.
His work as a historian, which included compiling lists of Olympic victors, was invaluable to Thucydides and subsequent historians as it allowed for a more precise dating of past events.
In mathematics he is attributed with the discovery of a curve — the quadratrix — used to trisect an angle. It is hard to make much sense of this alleged doctrine on the basis of available evidence.
As suggested above, Plato depicts Hippias as philosophically shallow and unable to keep up with Socrates in dialectical discussion. Prodicus of Ceos , who lived during roughly the same period as Protagoras and Hippias, is best known for his subtle distinctions between the meanings of words. He is thought to have written a treatise titled On the Correctness of Names.
There is a distinction here. We ought to listen impartially but not divide our attention equally: More should go to the wiser speaker and less to the more unlearned … In this way our meeting would take a most attractive turn, for you, the speakers, would then most surely earn the respect, rather than the praise, of those listening to you.
For respect is guilelessly inherent in the souls of listeners, but praise is all too often merely a deceitful verbal expression. Socrates, although perhaps with some degree of irony, was fond of calling himself a pupil of Prodicus Protagoras , a; Meno , 96d. Thrasymachus was a well-known rhetorician in Athens in the latter part of the fifth century B. He is depicted as brash and aggressive, with views on the nature of justice that will be examined in section 3a. The distinction between physis nature and nomos custom, law, convention was a central theme in Greek thought in the second half of the fifth century B.
Before turning to sophistic considerations of these concepts and the distinction between them, it is worth sketching the meaning of the Greek terms. Some of the Ionian thinkers now referred to as presocratics, including Thales and Heraclitus, used the term physis for reality as a whole, or at least its underlying material constituents, referring to the investigation of nature in this context as historia inquiry rather than philosophy.
The term nomos refers to a wide range of normative concepts extending from customs and conventions to positive law. Nonetheless, increased travel, as exemplified by the histories of Herodotus, led to a greater understanding of the wide array of customs, conventions and laws among communities in the ancient world.
This recognition sets up the possibility of a dichotomy between what is unchanging and according to nature and what is merely a product of arbitrary human convention. The dichotomy between physis and nomos seems to have been something of a commonplace of sophistic thought and was appealed to by Protagoras and Hippias among others. Antiphon applies the distinction to notions of justice and injustice, arguing that the majority of things which are considered just according to nomos are in direct conflict with nature and hence not truly or naturally just DK 87 A His account of the relation between physis and nomos nonetheless owes a debt to sophistic thought.
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, by contrast, is seen by observing animals in nature and relations between political communities where it can be seen that the strong prevail over the weak.
Callicles himself takes this argument in the direction of a vulgar sensual hedonism motivated by the desire to have more than others pleonexia , but sensual hedonism as such does not seem to be a necessary consequence of his account of natural justice. Like Callicles, Thrasymachus accuses Socrates of deliberate deception in his arguments, particularly in the claim the art of justice consists in a ruler looking after their subjects. Justice in conventional terms is simply a naive concern for the advantage of another.
From another more natural perspective, justice is the rule of the stronger, insofar as rulers establish laws which persuade the multitude that it is just for them to obey what is to the advantage of the ruling few.
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. A human being 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. On this reading we can regard Protagoras as asserting that if the wind, for example, feels or seems cold to me and feels or seems warm to you, then the wind is cold for me and is warm for you.
All three interpretations are live options, with i perhaps the least plausible. Whatever in any particular city is considered just and admirable is just and admirable in that city, for so long as the convention remains in place c. One difficulty this passage raises is that while Protagoras asserted that all beliefs are equally true, he also maintained that some are superior to others because they are more subjectively fulfilling for those who hold 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 better than others.
His appeal to better and worse beliefs could, however, be taken to refer to the persuasiveness and pleasure induced by 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 find competing arguments on five theses, including whether the good 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 , 89 has called the variability thesis: whatever is good in some qualified way is also bad in another respect and the same is the case for a wide range of contrary predicates. The reason that rhetoric was considered to be important at the time was for at least two reasons:. One, public persuasion i. The citizens would side with experts, such as doctors, when making decisions relevant to the domain of the expert, but no one was considered to be an expert of justice.
Many such arguments were manipulative, just as they are now. Two, people needed to know how to argue well in case they would go to court. The Athenians settled disputes and investigated crimes similar how we do now. They went to court and sued each other. It happened a lot at the time, and people who knew how to argue well were at an advantage. The fact that rhetoric concerns persuasion means that it can be used for any situation and for any purpose.
The orator, Gorgias, said that having profound oratory skills allows him to be more persuasive to non-experts than the experts are. Sound familiar? For example, he could trick people into buying a product for the wrong reasons, just like a snake oil salesmen. And yet these guys have been incredibly popular for thousands of years and can make a great deal of money.
Experts can be persuasive, and rhetoric can be used by experts. The problem with rhetoric is that it is so often used for the wrong reasons. For example, by charlatans. Consider all the unqualified charlatans who pretend to be experts, such as snake oil salesmen, new age gurus, cult leaders, astrologers, fortune tellers, spin doctors, political pundits, and conspiracy theorists.
These people can make a lot of money, even though they have no relevant expertise. They are masters of the art of deception and manipulation. False philosophers, false scientists, false doctors, false political experts, and false wise people have been swindling people out of their money for the entirety of human history.
Socrates saw sophistry and rhetoric as being manipulative. He thought we should rely on the best arguments and expertise rather than the nonrational forms of persuasion that rhetoric was often using. Many of the sophists traveled the world and realized that each society had somewhat different moral rules. This convinced many of them that morality is relative—there are no moral facts.
Instead, there are merely conventional moral beliefs that people in an area will agree with. Socrates thought the sophists who used persuasive arguments in political debates were being charlatans—they were not experts, and their opinions were being taken more seriously than the actual experts.
It refers to the attitude of those who want to know the truth and be wise rather than dogmatically hold onto their false beliefs. At one point in time philosophy referred to this general attitude being applied to all domains—science, theology, ethics, and logic were all part of philosophy. Moreover, philosophy referred to a method of rational argumentation and debate to be used in order to attain knowledge.
We can then try to sincerely consider what beliefs are supported by the best arguments and evidence. We should generally believe whatever is best justified by arguments in this way. The conventions which make them treat each other as strangers distort the reality by which they are all alike; hence they should recognise that reality by treating each other as friends and members of the same family, not as strangers.
The vignette gains added point from the fact that Hippias, speaking in Athens, is a citizen of Elis, a Peloponnesian state allied to Sparta in the war against Athens. Nature prompts us to do only what is advantageous to us, and if we try to act contrary to its promptings we inevitably suffer for it as a natural consequence, whereas morality typically restrains us from doing what is advantageous to ourselves and requires us to do what is disadvantageous, and if we violate the requirements of morality we come to harm only if we are found out.
Legal remedies are insufficient to prevent the law-abiding person from harm, since they are applicable only after the harm has been done, and there is always the chance that the law-abiding person will lose his case anyway.
Another part of the papyrus fragment B suggests that some legal norms are self-contradictory; it is just to bear true witness in court, and unjust to wrong someone who has not wronged you. So someone who bears true witness against someone who has not wronged him e. The argument here depends on an illicit assimilation of harming with wronging: the witness certainly harms the murderer by his true testimony, assuming that it leads to his conviction and execution, but there is no reason to agree that in giving that testimony the witness wrongs the murderer.
Moreover, he thereby puts himself in danger of retaliation by the person whom he has wronged; so once again obedience to nomos is disadvantageous. Morality, for Protagoras, consists in justice and self-restraint, dispositions which involve the replacement of Thrasymachean egoism by genuine regard for others as of equal moral status with oneself, and the crucial lesson of the Great Speech is that those dispositions, so far from requiring the stunting of human nature as Glaucon maintains, in fact constitute the perfection of that nature.
This defence of the authority of nomos rests on the idea that nomos itself, in the sense of legal and moral convention, arises from phusis. There is, then, no uniform sophistic position in the nomos-phusis debate; different sophists, or associates of sophists, are found among the disputants on either side.
Such speculations were not without their implications for the traditional Olympian pantheon; Xenophanes clearly intends to mock the cultural relativity of anthropomorphism, pointing out that different races of humans depict their gods in their own image, and suggesting that if horses and cattle could draw they would do the same DK 21B15— On the positive side he proclaims a single supreme non-anthropomorphic divinity, which appears to be identified either with the cosmos itself or with its intelligent directive force DK 21B23—6.
This type of theology is naturalistic, but non-reductive; Heraclitus is not saying that God is nothing but cosmic fire, implying that that fire is not really divine, but rather that divinity, or the divinities that matter, is not a super-hero like Apollo, but the everlasting, intelligent, self-directing cosmos itself.
In the fifth century the naturalistic approach to religion exhibits a more reductive aspect, with a consequent move towards a world-view which is not merely naturalistic, but in the modern sense secular.
Some sophists contributed to that process of secularisation. It is convenient to start with Anaxagoras, who, though not generally counted as a sophist, in that he did not offer instruction in how to live or teach rhetoric, nevertheless shared the scientific interests of sophists such as Hippias, and personified the growing rationalistic approach to natural phenomena.
Plato, Apology 26d , he did mean that it was nothing other than a rock, i. So, Plutarch reports, the people admired Anaxagoras but admired Lampon even more when Thucydides was ostracized soon afterwards. The naturalistic approach to meteorology etc. Among the phenomena for which reductive explanations were offered in the fifth century was the origin of religious belief itself.
An alternative account, or rather two accounts, equally reductive, of the origin of religion is attributed to Prodicus, who is reported by various sources as holding that the names of gods were originally applied either to things which are particularly important in human life, such as the sun, rivers, kinds of crops etc. It was presumably on the basis of this that Prodicus was counted as an atheist in antiquity Aetius I.
Most commentators agree that Prodicus was an atheist of some kind for a dissenting view see Sedley , at — , but there is some division of opinion on whether the atheism which he espoused was radical atheism, i. Of course atheism expressed by a character in a play cannot be directly attributed to the author, whoever he was; this is merely one of the expressions in fifth-century drama of a wide range of attitudes to religion, ranging from outright atheism e.
The significance of the Sisyphus fragment is rather as further evidence of the fact that in the late fifth century the rationalistic approach to the natural world, including human nature, provided the intellectual foundation of a range of views hostile to traditional religion, including explicit atheism. According to some sources the outrage occasioned by this work led to his books being publicly burned and his being forced to flee from Athens to escape prosecution, and he is said by some to have drowned while trying to escape by sea DK 80A1—4, It is probable, then, that Protagoras was supportive of traditional religious practice, while the wording of his proclamation of agnosticism does not even offer a direct challenge to conventional belief.
He cannot know whether or not the gods exist or what they are like; this presumably though in the light of Protagorean subjectivism the inference is not as secure as it would otherwise be implies that no-one can know these things, but lack of knowledge is no bar to belief, particularly if that belief is socially useful, as Protagoras probably thought it was.
Euenus is otherwise known chiefly as a poet though Plato Phaedrus a mentions some contributions to rhetorical theory , and his appearance in this context indicates the continuation into the sophistic era of the older tradition of the poet as moral teacher see above.
If Gorgias is included in this context among the teachers of excellence, there is a difficulty in that at Meno 95c Meno, a pupil of Gorgias, says that what he most admires about him is that not only does he never claim to teach excellence, but that he makes fun of those who do. Consistently with that, in the dialogue named after him he begins by claiming that what he has to teach is not any system of values, but a technique of persuasion, which is in itself value-free, but is capable of being employed for whatever purposes, good or bad, are adopted by the person who has mastered it, just as skill in martial arts can be used for good ends or bad a—c.
But in fact the distinction is not so clear, since Gorgias is readily induced to agree that a political orator has to know what is right and wrong, and that he Gorgias will teach his pupil those things if he happens not to know them already a—c. Perhaps it is assumed that normally the pupil will know in advance what is right and wrong, so Gorgias will not have to teach him that, and can concentrate on the essential skill of persuasion.
But the point of learning to persuade will be to gain power over others, and thereby to achieve personal and political success. So Gorgias will rightly be counted among the teachers of excellence; what is distinctive about his teaching is the prominence of persuasion in the achievement of excellence.
But persuasion, though central, was not everything. Making this claim seems to commit him to the kind of encyclopedic knowledge which we find Hippias displaying see below. Scholarly opinion has been and remains divided as to whether this was intended as a parody of Eleatic writing or as a serious piece of philosophy. What can definitely be said is that it shows some knowledge of Parmenides, that it at least raises serious philosophical questions, such as the relation of thought to reality and the possibility of referring to things which do not exist, that no question which it raises is developed to any significant extent and that most of its arguments are extremely feeble.
It reads like a piece written by a clever man with no real interest in philosophy, but it is doubtful whether we shall ever know why he wrote it. Hippias was above all a polymath. In the Greater Hippias b—e he describes how he lectured at Sparta on genealogy and all aspects of ancient history, and he is variously reported as lecturing on painting and sculpture, as having developed a mnemonic technique which enabled him to repeat a list of fifty names after a single hearing both DK 86A2 Philostratus , and as appearing at the Olympic Games wearing and carrying nothing which he had not made himself, down to his signet-ring Lesser Hippias b.
Presumably the competitions were eristic contests see above. We saw above that his moral and religious stance was conservative, and his championing of phusis against nomos see above is rather an appeal to cosmopolitan elitism than any kind of challenge to conventional morality.
Perhaps more than any other single person he encapsulates the complexity of the sophistic phenomenon. Apart from it he is best known for his insistence on the correct use of language Plato, Euthydemus e , in particular fine discriminations of the senses of near-synonyms, a topic in which he seems to have specialised. This is a book I read recently, and it's one of the best I've read in years on happiness and success. Shawn helped teach the famous Harvard course on happiness, and brings the best of that research and more into this great book.
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