The Sophists

(Originally written September 6, 2006 in Book 10)

The Sophists

• Sophism was a byproduct of the disintegration of morality in Greece.
• The Sophists were neither scientists nor philosophers. They are traveling teachers.
• Sophists were paid, a novel idea in Greece and an affront to the ancient nobility and the intelligentsia.
• The sophists were teachers of "virtue". They taught how to influence people.
• The sophists varied in their beliefs. There was no common doctrine.

I'm tired. Why?

• The sophists were received warmly by the newly wealthy merchant class and by eager young learners.
• They are met with hostility by the superstitious and devout.
• The mob rule in Athens often tried sophists for atheism and treason, making no distinction between the two.

Estimation of the Sophists

• The sophists' interest in rhetoric or oratory skill made them pay more attention to the nature of language.
• Plato learned that language played a large part in framing a problem and the solution to the problem.
• They were practical. They swept away superstition, but had nothing to replace it.
• They were extremely skeptical.
• Science debunked the notion of gods as causal agents. Aristophanes noted, "when Zeus is uncrowned, chaos succeeds to his place" (Jones, 65).
• "Xenophanes' discovery that every man makes god in his own image had led him to conclude that god transcends all human grasp, it led others to the conclusion that god is only a figment of the human mind" (Jones, 65).
• Skepticism undermined the Greek religion, but was left unchecked to undermine everything. Science could not replace the moral code of Greece, though it had debunked anthropomorphic origin stories and causal relationships. Science and skepticism freed Greece from mythology, but rendered it utterly corrupt and devoid of morality.
• But since science was not uniform people began to become skeptical of it. Science was ripped to bits by skepticism and further exacerbated by paradoxes from Parmenidean logic. Man was hopeless in his quest for comprehending the universe. Both the gods and science were gone; what did they have left?

Protagoras

• One of the earliest sophists
• Worked out a theory of sensory perception that was based on Heraclitean physical theory.
• The theory led to skepticism
• He held that neither reason nor perception gave truth about the world; thus, objective knowledge of a public reality was impossible.
• "Man is the measure of all things" was the battle cry of Protagoras. It was a complete rejection of Thales and like philosophies.
• Everyone since Thales held that 1) there is a public, objective reality and 2) reality is intelligible by the human mind. Protagoras denied all of this.
• He also rejected Parmenides' theory of logical consistency as the test of reality, maintaining that human opinion was the test.
• He relied on common sense and denounced anything that was against what really appeared to be true, as the unchanging reality of the Parmenidean one was.
• He believed that one should participate in their local religion because they can't know the absolute truth anyway. That way they won't offend anyone unnecessarily. The same was true of social customs.
• Conformity was the "goodness" that Protagoras taught.

The Younger Sophists

• The younger sophists were much more radical than the social conservative Protagoras, and equally skeptical.
• They are concerned with figuring out if law was 'physis' or 'nomos' 
• Physis was what was real. it was a term used in science and lent weight to the question.
• Nomos was meant to mean a social convention or man-made.
• No educated man could believe that the gods existed or gave laws and thus law would have to be mere convention. So, if it is a mere convention, why should we obey it?
• They did not fully reject Protagoras' view, just reinterpreted it. Protagoras followed the rules, not because they were good, but because it was advantageous for him to do so. The other Sophists said, "don't follow the rules because it is advantageous for you not to".
• The discarded aristocratic youth, skeptical of science and cynical of democracy denounced this sophism.
• These men learned what they wanted to know, "There is no real justice or right, that these are only names applied to local and changing conventions, and that the only real authority in the world is force" (Jones, 69). Callicles and Thrasymachus are of this sort.
• Callicles calls justice consists in the strong having more than the weak.
• Moderation was foolish to Callicles. Bodily pleasures are the good in life and that which enlightened man aims at.
• Thrasymachus holds justice being a a morally binding way of life as utterly illusionary. He calls justice on these terms linguistic in nature, pure language play.
• Sophistic teaching was a symptom of the Greek's moral decline, no so much a cause.