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]