Sophists
SOPHISTS
In English, the term sophist is most often used pejoratively, for one who argues with devious abuses of logic. The Greek Sophistês took on a similar sense in the fifth century BCE., but its original meaning is simply expert or wise person. In the study of Greek philosophy, the sophists denote a group of teachers and intellectuals of the fifth and fourth century BCE (the term is also used for later practitioners of their profession; this soon comes to be interchangeable with rhetoric or public speaking, as in the so-called Second Sophistic movement of the second century CE).
The sophists are perennially ambiguous and controversial figures, and it has long been debated whether they should be deemed philosophers. Two central points seem clear: First, the sophists did not constitute a philosophical school with a shared set of metaphysical and ethical positions; second, a number of them did develop serious, innovative, and influential ideas and arguments on a wide range of topics, and so demand inclusion in the history of ancient philosophy.
The sophists are best seen as an intellectual movement, comparable to the philosophies of the eighteenth century or the progressive thinkers of Victorian England (some of whom, such as George Grote, were champions of the ancient sophists). As always with such movements, it is debatable who should be counted as a member, and membership is in any case more a matter of shared interests and tendencies than common doctrines. The leading figures of the sophistic movement so understood include Protagoras, Gorgias, Hippias, Antiphon, and Prodicus. Gorgias was primarily a rhetorician (i.e., an expert in and teacher of public speaking), but the two professions must have overlapped widely, and his surviving texts are among the most important for reconstructing sophistic ideas. Socrates was often counted among the sophists by his contemporaries, and is used to represent the whole movement in Aristophanes' Clouds ; in a number of dialogues Plato aims to show that he differs from them radically.
Sophistic ideas have also come from some important anonymous texts, such as the Dissoi Logoi and the Anonymus Iamblichi (a long discussion of virtue, apparently of sophistic origin, inserted by the Neoplatonist Iamblichus in his Protrepticus ), or of contested authorship (notably the fragment on religion from the satyr play Sisyphus, attributed to both Critias and Euripides).
They can also be found in contemporary historical and medical texts (e.g., Thucydides' Melian Dialogues, the Hippocratic On the Art ), as well as comedy and tragedy (especially Euripides). So there is no firm dividing line between sophistic thought and the broader fifth-century Greek culture around them, which was marked by a vigorous questioning of tradition and empirical, naturalistic researches into many subjects (historiê ).
Sociologically, the sophists were professional teachers, the first in Greece to offer a higher education in the liberal arts. Sophists (who came from all over the Greek world) traveled from city to city presenting themselves to prospective students through public displays; this could involve giving a set speech (epideixis ), performing feats of memory, undertaking to answer any question the audience might pose, or offering question-and-answer refutations of others. This practice of refutation, usually given the pejorative name eristic, is formally identical to the Socratic elenchus ; to differentiate the two, Plato emphasizes that Socrates argues in pursuit of the truth and moral improvement, whereas sophists argue for victory and for money. Some sophists gave displays at the Olympic games, and the sophistic practices themselves were intensely agonistic.
Plato's Protagoras gives a vivid depiction of a gathering of sophists engaged in argument, banter, and competitive intellectual showing-off. Such sessions served as advertisements to the wealthy young men who made up the audience, encouraging them to sign on for further teaching. This would be an expensive proposition: The sophists (and above all Protagoras) seem to have charged far more than any other contemporary professionals, and became enormously rich from their teaching. Sophists also served on embassies for their native cities, drafted laws, and wrote books; they were famous and influential—and bitterly controversial—public intellectuals as well as teachers.
Most sophists are said to have claimed to teach virtue (arête ), but their curricula and teaching methods varied. In the Protagoras, Protagoras chides Hippias for forcing students to study subjects like mathematics and astronomy; he himself claims to teach them good judgment (euboulia ), enabling them both to manage their private affairs and to succeed in politics, and accepts that this amounts to the teaching of virtue. He also claims that the greatest part of education is the ability to analyze and criticize poetry. So the sophistic teaching of virtue was not a matter of moralistic indoctrination; rather, the sophists taught their students to reflect on traditional values, to analyze and criticize the literary texts that discussed them, and to apply this learning in a political career.
In practice, their teaching seems to have centered on rhetoric or public speaking (hence the blurriness of the line between rhetorician and sophist), which was the key skill for a political career. The connection between teaching rhetoric and teaching virtue is easier to understand if we bear in mind the traditional, Homeric sense of arête as excellence—that is, the skills and personal qualities that make a gentleman successful in his career and a valuable asset to his community. By teaching the arts of political success, the sophists were teaching virtue in a quite traditional sense. In doing so they prompted debate about just what virtue or excellence really consists in, and in particular about the status of qualities such as justice, dikaiosunê, which seem to benefit the community at the expense of their possessor.
The evidence for sophistic ideas is uneven and very defective. There are several brief, but substantial, works by Gorgias (On Not Being ; Defense of Helen ), and a few pages worth of Antiphon's On Truth ; but for Protagoras, the leading figure of the movement, only a handful of brief fragments (that is, trustworthy-looking quotations in later authors) survive. Moreover, many of our texts are ambiguous or difficult to interpret. For instance, both the Dissoi Logoi and Antiphon's discussion of justice seem to argue for contradictory conclusions; perhaps they are exercises in antilogikê, opposing arguments, a sophistic genre associated with Protagoras. Gorgias's On Not Being and the Defense of Helen both seem to be exercises in defending the indefensible; whether they also have serious philosophical agendas is still debated.
A further difficulty is posed by the all-important evidence of Plato, who fixed forever the stereotype of the Sophist. Plato vividly depicts sophists in a number of dialogues (Protagoras, Gorgias, Republic [Thrasymachus], Hippias Major and Minor, and Euthydemus ), and the Sophist is devoted to defining their nature. But Plato's evidence is not consistent: For instance, the Protagoras and the Euthydemus give very different pictures of sophistic argument, and the Protagoras and Theaetetus seem to give conflicting accounts of Protagoras's ethical views. Moreover, Plato's presentation of the sophists is sometimes warped by hostile prejudice (though, as Grote [1865] and T.H. Irwin [1995] have noted, he is not as uniformly hostile as scholars sometimes assume), and by his anxiety to distinguish them as sharply as possible from Socrates.
Unsurprisingly, given the focus of their teaching, sophistic thought seems to have centered on ethical and political topics. However, sophistic interests varied greatly; in some cases they were very broad, and several sophists are associated with ideas in mathematics or natural science. So the traditional scholarly contrast between the sophists and the pre-socratics, with their researches into natural science, is probably misguided or at least overstated. The sophists also were founders of what are now called the social sciences; they offered theories of the origins of human institutions such as law and religion, and took a particular scientific interest in language and the norms applicable to it. Here in the social realm, the closest thing to a unifying pattern in sophistic thought is found—their concern to distinguish phusis and nomos (i.e., the natural and the merely conventional or, as one might now say, socially constructed).
Surviving sophistic texts analyze a wide range of human institutions and values—above all, justice—in these terms, with the assumption that nature represents a deeper or more binding norm than convention. Combined with the sophists' recognition of the differing norms of various cultures (see the Dissoi Logoi ) and their skepticism about traditional religion, this privileging of the natural could be seen as undermining the authority of moral tradition. However, hostility toward the sophists probably had less to do with their particular theories than with their teaching to all comers the ability to speak persuasively, and with it the power to manipulate both political assemblies and legal proceedings.
It is now generally recognized that it is wrong to describe the sophists collectively as moral skeptics, immoralists, or relativists (Bett 1989, 2002). Protagoras is presented as a relativist in Plato's Theaetetus, but not in his earlier and probably more historically accurate Protagoras. The Dissoi Logoi presents a wealth of evidence for the cultural relativity of values, but argues against relativistic conclusions as well as for them. Sophistic uses of nomos and phusis were often in the service of conflicting ethical and political theories, and attempts to pin the sophists down to any common moral theory are doomed by the sheer diversity of sophistic thought. If anything, the sophists (as one would expect given the competitive character of their profession) tended to take up positions in opposition to each other—even if the battle lines are often now blurred by the incompleteness of evidence available.
On matters of natural science, metaphysics, and epistemology, it is still more difficult to identify shared sophistic positions. Antiphon's On Truth seems to have offered a complete cosmogony on natural science: Aristotle, in Physics, reports him as claiming that the true essence of a wooden bed is wood because if planted it would reproduce a tree rather than another bed. Presumably the force of the scientific part of the work was to spell out this kind of distinction between the underlying natures of things (the realm of phusis ) and merely superficial human arrangements and projections, (nomos ).
Gorgias's On Not Being seems intended to support a skeptical conclusion, at least as a critique of metaphysicians like Parmenides. His main criticism was: If beings do have a real nature independent of humans, it can neither be known or communicated. Plato's Theaetetus attributes a sophisticated relativism or subjectivism in epistemology (and ethics) to Protagoras: its slogan, "Man is the measure of all things," must go back to Protagoras's work Truth, but how much of the detailed theory presented by Plato that is genuinely Protagorean is uncertain. Even setting aside other sophistic views (where evidence is even scantier), the most these positions could be said to share is a critical orientation—a tendency to diagnose beliefs and perceptions (both everyday and scientific, or philosophical) as irreducibly subjective.
In keeping with their activities as teachers and writers, and their interest in the analysis of human conventions, the sophists were noted for their researches into language. Prodicus was celebrated for drawing fine distinctions in the meanings of words. It is thought that Protagoras analyzed the parts of speech, and claimed that the words for wrath and helmet, feminine in Greek, were properly masculine. The sophists are often associated with claims that falsehood and contradiction are impossible, but the evidence for this is unclear and confusing, and these claims are hard to square with the eristic practice of inducing contradictions in others. One might suspect that distinctive views about the nature of truth were entailed by Protagoras's Measure Thesis, and lay behind his practice of argument on both sides of a question (antilogikê ); but attempts to reconstruct sophistic ideas on these questions are highly speculative.
See also Antiphon; Gorgias of Leontini; Nomos and Phusis; Protagoras of Abdera; Socrates.
Bibliography
Barney, R. "The Sophistic Movement." In The Blackwell Companion to Ancient Philosophy, edited by Mary Louise Gill and Pierre Pellegrin. Oxford: Blackwell, 2005.
Bett, R. "Is There a Sophistic Ethics?" Ancient Philosophy 22 (2002): 235–262.
Bett, R. "The Sophists and Relativism." Phronesis 34 (1989): 139–169.
Broadie, Sarah. "The Sophists and Socrates." In The Cambridge Companion to Greek and Roman Philosophy, edited by D.N. Sedley. Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge University Press, 2003.
Diels, H. Die fragmente der Vorsokratiker, 6th ed. revised by W. Kranz. Berlin: Weidmann, 1951–1952.
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Gagarin, M., and P. Woodruff. Early Greek Political Thought from Homer to the Sophists. Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge University Press, 1995.
Grote, George. A History of Greece, 4th ed. London: John Murray, 1872.
Grote, George. Plato and the Other Companions of Socrates. London: John Murray, 1865.
Guthrie, W.K.C. A History of Greek Philosophy. Vol. 3. Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge University Press, 1969.
Irwin, T.H. "Plato's Objections to the Sophists." In The Greek World, edited by C.A. Powell. London: Routledge, 1995.
Kerferd, G.B. The Sophistic Movement. Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge University Press, 1981.
Morrison, J. S. "The Truth of Antiphon." Phronesis 8 (1963): 35–49.
Nehamas, A. "Eristic, Antilogic, Sophistic, Dialectic: Plato's Demarcation of Philosophy from Sophistry." History of Philosophy Quarterly 7 (1990): 3–16.
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Rachel Barney (2005)
Sophists
SOPHISTS
The term sophist (Gr. σοφιστής), meaning an expert either in practical or theoretical matters, was initially equivalent to σοφός (wise man). In the fifth and fourth centuries b.c. it designated one who possessed wisdom and virtue and for a livelihood made a profession of teaching these to others (Plato, Prot. 348E; Xenophon, Memorab. 1.2). The name gradually assumed a derogatory meaning, largely through the Platonic and Aristotelian writings in which the Sophists are portrayed as professors of apparent, not true, wisdom (Prot. 312C–313C; Soph. elen. 165a 19–24). Thus in time it came to signify a quibbler or one who employs specious arguments (sophisms), the sense it still has in nontechnical usage (see fallacy).
Characterization. The Sophists first appeared in Greece in the fifth century b.c. as traveling teachers of political virtue to the sons of wealthy families, for which they received substantial fees. With them a new kind of paideia was introduced into Greece, dictated by the exigencies of the social order. The Sophists imparted the prized arts of eloquence and persuasion, and the more eminent among them also instructed their charges in arithmetic, geometry, music and astronomy. Thus they contributed to the development of disciplines later to be known as the trivium and quadrivium. In extensive travels throughout Greece they served the cause of Panhellenism well; they also emphasized the conventional character of the social and political institutions of the individual Greek city-states.
Of the writings of the Sophists only a few fragments remain, more rhetorical than philosophical in content. The Sophists wrote chiefly for their contemporaries, and later Greeks did not preserve their works as productions of permanent value. Historians of philosophy depend greatly on Plato's dialogues, especially the Protagoras, Gorgias and Theaetetus, for knowledge of their doctrines. Aristotle also supplies important information about them. Both are reliable sources, though somewhat prejudiced. The Sophists were individualists, but they did have a common Eleatic, Heraclitean and Democritean background. Avoiding the cosmological speculation of the pre-Socratics, they concentrated on problems of man, his knowledge and society.
Sopristic philosophy was a radical phenomenalistic relativism that denied a knowledge of things in terms of being (ἐπιστήμη) and satisfied itself with mere opinion (δόξα) as sufficient for practical human needs. Although philosophy inherited little from the Sophists, without their challenge Socrates, Plato and Aristotle would not have achieved their masterly solutions to the problems of knowledge.
Protagoras. Protagoras of Abdera (c. 590–420 b.c.) was the first Sophist. Very little is known of him except that he visited Athens on several occasions. Some ancient writers testify that he was an associate of democritus, though this is questionable. According to Diogenes Laertius (9.55), Protagoras wrote several treatises, of which only a few scattered fragments remain. As a teacher of political virtue he trained his charges in the art of making the weaker cause appear the stronger (Aristotle, Rhet. 1402a 23–24). He held the opinion that two contradictory accounts can be given about everything (Diogenes 9.51). How he developed this point is not known. Earlier zeno of elea employed the same technique in his arguments against motion and plurality. Protagoras is most famous for his statement that "man is the measure of all things, of existing things that they exist and of non-existing things that they do not exist" (Sextus Empiricus, Against the Logicians 1.60). Philosophers have variously interpreted this as meaning either the individual or collective man. Plato (Theaet. 152A–154B) takes it to mean individual man; Aristotle (Meta. 1062b 12–15) and Diogenes Laertius agree. For Plato it meant that things are as the individual knower perceives them to be, and he relates it to the universal flux of heraclitus. Aristotle reduces it to a denial of the principle of contradiction. The statement most probably refers to the second part of "The Way of Seeming" of parmenides. In another statement attributed to him, Protagoras seems to profess complete agnosticism: "About the gods, I have no way of knowing whether they exist or do not exist, nor of what form they are; for there are many things which hinder knowledge, the obscurity and the shortness of man's life" (Die Fragmente der Vorsokratiker: Griechisch und Deutsch, 80B, 4).
Gorgias. Gorgias of Leontini (c. 480–380 b.c.), an eminent Sicilian, had been a pupil of empedocles and was himself the master of Isocrates. Most of Gorgias's writings were rhetorical in nature, but his chief work, "On Not-Being or On Nature" (περὶ το[symbol omitted] μὴ ὄντος ἤ περὶ φύσεως), was philosophical. It contains three nihilistic statements, together with a proof of each: (1) nothing is; (2) even if anything is, it is unknowable to man; and (3) even if anything is knowable, it is incommunicable to others (Sextus Empiricus, ibid. 1.65–87). Various interpretations have been given, namely, that they are facetious statements, that Gorgias was merely displaying his rhetorical skill, that they represented an anti-Eleatic polemic, that they were intended to abolish the copula "is," or finally that they expressed the tragedy of human reason. Since the ancients understood them in a serious way, they can hardly be facetious. They are the logical result of Eleatic dialectic pushed to its limit, expressing a radical intellectual pessimism.
Hippias of Elis. Plato is the chief source of information about this rhetorician in the Protagoras and Hippiss Maior (probably authentic). A younger contemporary of Protagoras, Hippias was a prodigious polymath with a most versatile mind, but boastful and vain. Very little is known of his philosophical doctrines, for all his writings have disappeared. According to Plato he set up a radical opposition between nature and law (Prot. 337D). This was a view common to the Sophists.
See Also: greek philosophy.
Bibliography: f. c. copleston, History of Philosophy (Westminster, Md 1946–) v.1. j. owens, A History of Ancient Western Philosophy (New York 1959). k. freeman, The Pre-Socratic Philosophers (2d ed. Cambridge, Mass. 1959); tr., Ancilla to the Pre-Socratic Philosophers (Cambridge, Mass. 1957). w. w. jaeger, Paideia: The Ideals of Greek Culture, tr. g. highet (2d ed. New York 1945–) v.1. m. untersteiner, The Sophists, tr. k. freeman (Oxford 1954). h. diels, Die Fragmente der Vorsokratiker: Griechisch und Deutsch, ed. w. kranz, 3 v. (8th ed. Berlin 1956); v.1 (10th ed. Berlin 1960–61).
[l. a. barth]