The word sophist comes from the Greek word σοφιστής (sophistḗs), which originally meant “one who is highly skilled or learned in his craft.” In the fifth century BCE, various professional teachers of public speaking began to emerge in the Greek world calling themselves σοφισταί (which is the plural form of σοφιστής).
These teachers would typically come to a city and court wealthy patrons, offering to teach them how to speak persuasively in exchange for a tuition fee. Sometimes they would teach other subjects as well, such as philosophy, music, poetry, or mathematics. They would stay in a given city long enough to teach any wealthy people who were willing to pay them for lessons and then move on to the next city to teach anyone who was willing to pay for lessons there.
The sophists have a bit of a bad reputation nowadays. The very word sophist itself has come to mean a person who uses rhetorical trickery and fallacious arguments to deceive people into believing falsehoods. In this post, I want to peel back the millennia of negative portrayals to explore who the sophists really were and what they really wrote (for most part in their own words). By the end of it, hopefully it will be clear what the real differences were between the sophists and the philosophers like Plato (lived c. 428 – c. 347 BCE) and Xenophon (lived c. 430 – c. 354 BCE) who vilified them.
Protagoras of Abdera: the first of the sophists
The earliest of the sophists is generally agreed to have been Protagoras of Abdera (lived c. 490 – c. 420 BCE), a radical thinker who dared to question everything the Greeks traditionally believed. A few fragments of his work have survived. The first of these fragments is his saying “πάντων χρημάτων μέτρον ἐστὶν ἄνθρωπος,” which means “The human being is the measure of all things.” In saying this, Protagoras seems to have meant that truth can only be discovered through human faculties, so many people may have drastically different perspectives on the same issue and all those perspectives may be equally valid or equally likely to be correct.
Protagoras is reported to have believed that there are many sides to every argument and that any side can at least hypothetically be argued for persuasively. An anonymous surviving text known as the Dissoi Logoi or Double Arguments, which explains how to argue for one position and then how to argue for the exact opposite position for a range of issues, probably reflects the influence of Protagoras’s teachings.
As I have previously mentioned in this article I posted in September 2019 about evidence for atheism in ancient Greece and this article I posted in January 2020 about whether the Greeks believed in their myths, Protagoras is one of the very few individuals in ancient Greece who is known to have seriously questioned the existence of the deities. He wrote a treatise titled On the Deities, the opening line of which is quoted by the Greek biographer Diogenes Laërtios (fl. c. third century CE) in his Lives and Opinions of Eminent Philosophers 9.8.51:
“περὶ μὲν θεῶν οὐκ ἔχω εἰδέναι, οὔθ’ ὡς εἰσὶν οὔθ’ ὡς οὐκ εἰσὶν οὔθ’ ὁποῖοί τινες ἰδέαν· πολλὰ γὰρ τὰ κωλύοντά με εἰδέναι, ἥ τε ἀδηλότης καὶ βραχὺς ὢν ὁ βίος τοῦ ἀνθρώπου.”
This means, in my own translation:
“Concerning deities, I cannot know whether they exist or not, nor can I know of what sort they may be; for many things prevent me from knowing, namely the obscurity of the subject and the brief life of a human being.”
This is probably the earliest definite statement of agnosticism known in the entire corpus of surviving ancient Greek texts and fragments.
Tim Whitmarsh, who is the A. G. Leventis Professor of Greek Culture at the University of Cambridge, argues in his book Battling the Gods: Atheism in the Ancient World, published in 2015 by Vintage Books, on pages 88–91, that this quotation from Protagoras is not just an expression of agnosticism, but an expression of agnostic atheism.
Whitmarsh notes that Protagoras is attested elsewhere as having written that anything that cannot be known about by humans cannot be said to exist. This means that, when he says it is impossible to know whether the deities exist, he’s also implying that we have no reason to believe that they do exist.
Mainstream Greek society was shocked and disturbed by Protagoras’s forthright agnosticism. Diogenes Laërtios claims in his Lives and Opinions of Eminent Philosophers 9.8.52 that the Athenians were so horrified by Protagoras’s statements in On the Deities that they cast him out of their city and collected all the copies of his works that they could find so that they could burn them all in a massive bonfire in the agora.
There are very good reasons to doubt that this supposed incident reported by Diogenes really happened, but even the fact that people were telling a story about Protagoras supposedly being cast out from Athens and his treatises burned reflects just how threatening his ideas must have seemed.
ABOVE: Democritus and Protagoras, painted between 1663 and 1664 by the Italian Baroque painter Salvator Rosa
Gorgias and the art of counterintuitive arguing
Many other sophists followed in Protagoras’s footsteps. In the same generation as him was Gorgias (lived 483 – 375 BCE), who was born in the Greek city of Leontinoi in southern Italy. In around 427 BCE, when he was probably in his late fifties, Gorgias came to Athens as an ambassador on behalf of his native city-state to persuade the Athenians to protect Leontinoi against Syracusan aggression. He is said to have given a stunningly persuasive speech.
After this occasion, Gorgias established a reputation for himself as a highly talented teacher of rhetoric in mainland Greece, traveling around between several different cities, including Athens and Larisa. He regularly gave speeches to showcase his rhetorical abilities at Panhellenic festivals, including at the Olympic Games.
As I discuss in this article I posted yesterday about obscure texts from ancient Greece and Rome, Gorgias seems to have showcased his rhetorical skill by making convincing-sounding arguments for positions that seem intuitively ridiculous. He notably wrote a speech or treatise titled On Nonexistence, which has not survived to the present day in the original, but is known through two lengthy summaries, one in Sextos Empeirikos’s Against the Logicians 7.65–86 and the other in Pseudo-Aristotle’s On Melissos, Xenophanes, and Gorgias 5–6.
In the work, Gorgias argues using paradoxical reasoning that nothing really exists; that, even if something did exist, it would be impossible to know anything about that thing; that, even if something did exist and it were possible to know anything about it, that knowledge could never be communicated; and, finally, that, even if something did exist, it were possible to know something about it, and it were possible to communicate that knowledge, it would be impossible for anyone to understand it.
Gorgias also wrote two speeches defending prominent mythological figures, both of which have survived to the present day complete. The more famous of the two is his Encomium of Helene, in which he attempts to absolve Helene of Troy of all guilt for causing the Trojan War. The other speech is his Defense of Palamedes, defending the legendary Achaian hero Palamedes, who was put to death for allegedly betraying the Achaians to the Trojans, written in Palamedes’s own voice as though it were a speech for him to deliver at his own trial.
ABOVE: Detail from Wikimedia Commons showing Side A of an Apulian red-figure bell-krater by the Painter of Stockholm dating to between c. 380 and c. 370 BCE, depicting Helene and Paris, now held in the Louvre Museum. Gorgias wrote a speech defending Helene of Troy.
Prodikos and the deities as natural personifications
Gorgias was followed by many other successful sophists, with perhaps the most famous of these being Prodikos of Keos (lived c. 465 – c. 395 BCE), who, like Protagoras before him, was openly religiously unorthodox.
As I discuss in this article I wrote in March 2020, people in ancient Greece and Rome generally believed that the deities were real, anthropomorphic beings with human-like personalities and extraordinary supernatural powers. Prodikos seems to have rejected this conception of the deities and instead argued that the deities are really just human-invented personifications of natural phenomena. He writes in fragment D-K B5, preserved through quotation by Sextos Empeirikos in his Against the Logicians 9.18:
“ἥλιον. . . καὶ σελήνην καὶ ποταμοὺς καὶ κρήνας καὶ καθόλου πάντα τὰ ὠφελοῦντα τὸν βίον ἡμῶν οἱ παλαιοὶ θεοὺς ἐνόμισαν διὰ τὴν ἀπ’ αὐτῶν ὠφέλειαν, καθάπερ Αἰγύπτιοι τὸν Νεῖλον καὶ διὰ τοῦτο τὸν μὲν ἄρτον Δήμητραν νομισθῆναι, τὸν δὲ οἶνον Διόνυσον, τὸ δὲ ὕδωρ Ποσειδῶνα, τὸ δὲ πῦρ Ἥφαιστον καὶ ἤδη τῶν εὐχρηστούντων ἕκαστον.”
This means, in my own translation:
“Ancient people regarded the sun and moon and rivers and fountains and, in general, all the things that benefit our life as deities on account of their benefit, just like the Egyptians regard the Nile; and, on account of this thing, they regarded bread as Demeter and wine as Dionysos and water as Poseidon and fire as Hephaistos and, in this way, each of the things that benefit us.”
In Greece in the fifth century BCE, this was a radical, subversive notion. To argue that the deities were really just human-invented personifications of natural phenomena was to argue that the deities as most people knew and believed in them did not exist.
ABOVE: Detail from Wikimedia Commons of a relief carving of Dionysos from Karystos, dating to the fourth century BCE, now held in the Archaeological Museum of Chalkida (left) and detail from Wikimedia Commons of an Apulian red-figure hydria by the Varrese Painter dating to c. 340 BCE, now held in the Altes Museum in Berlin (right)
Lykophron and the social contract theory
The sophists’ questioning of traditional norms and values also extended into the realm of politics. Mainstream Greek society traditionally assumed that νόμος (nómos), meaning “law” or “custom,” was objectively rooted in φύσις (phýsis), which means “nature” or “the natural order.”
The sophists seem to have generally rejected this idea and instead maintained that laws and customs are merely human conventions. This, however, meant that they needed to come up with new models to explain why states and laws were necessary in the first place. After all, if their existence was not ordained by nature, then what were they good for?
The sophist Lykophron (fl. late fifth century – early fourth century BCE), who was most likely a student of Gorgias, was possibly the first thinker to propose the social contract theory of political philosophy. Aristotle (lived 384 – 322 BCE) describes Lykophron’s model very briefly in his Politics 3.5.1280b8. He writes, as translated by H. Rackham:
“And the law is a covenant or, in the phrase of the sophist Lykophron, a guarantee of men’s just claims on one another, but it is not designed to make the citizens virtuous and just.”
In addition to coming up with novel new interpretations of law and governance, the sophists also attacked the traditional values of the aristocracy in particular. You see, Greek aristocratic men traditionally prided themselves on their birth and called themselves “καλοὶ κἀγαθοί” (kaloì kagathoí), which means “beautiful and good.” Lykophron, however, attacked the idea that there was any value at all in having a noble birth, declaring that people of low birth are just as likely to be beautiful and good as the high-born and the high-born are just as likely to be ugly and immoral as the low-born.
Aristotle summarizes Lykophron’s opinion on the matter of noble birth as follows in his Fragment 91 (Rose), as translated in The Older Sophists, edited by Rosamond Kent Sprague, on page 69:
“Is [good birth] something valuable and worthwhile or, as Lykophron the sophist wrote, something altogether worthless? Comparing it with other goods, he asserts: ‘Now the nobility of good birth is obscure, and its grandeur a matter of words,’ on the grounds that preference for it looks to opinion, whereas in fact there is no difference between the ignoble and the well-born.”
In line with the views articulated by Lykophron, politically, the sophists seem to have usually been in favor of democracy and opposed to oligarchy.
ABOVE: Detail of a photo from Wikimedia Commons of a relief carving from Athens dating to c. 336 BCE depicting the personification of Democracy crowning the Demos, now held in the Agora Archaeological Museum in Athens. The sophists were usually pro-democracy.
The sophists’ bad reputation
As the sophists grew in fame and number, many Greek people came to view them with intense suspicion. Ancient Greek society was, in general, deeply conservative and hostile to change, especially when it came to matters of morality and religion. For conservative-minded Greeks, the sophists who were going around undermining conventional morality with their relativistic and sometimes irreligious teachings became a sort of intellectual bogeyman, in a similar way to how “postmodernism” has become a bogeyman for many conservatives in the twenty-first-century United States.
It didn’t help that the most famous and successful sophists like Protagoras, Gorgias, Prodikos, Antiphon, Hippias, Lykophron, and so forth all charged standard tuition fees that were arguably exorbitant. As a result, only the very wealthy could afford to hire their services and, even for them, it would cost a pretty penny.
Diogenes Laërtios records in his Lives and Opinions of Eminent Philosophers 9.8.52 that Protagoras charged his students a standard fee of one hundred minai for his lessons. Gorgias is said to have charged the same rate. Several ancient authors—including Cicero in his On the Orator 3.32.129, Pliny the Elder in his Natural History 33.83, Pausanias in his Guide to Greece 6.17.7 and 10.18.7, and Philostratos of Athens in his Lives of the Sophists 1.9.4–5—record that Gorgias dedicated a gold-plated statue of himself at Delphoi, which indicates that he probably accumulated considerable personal wealth through his teaching.
ABOVE: Photograph from Wikimedia Commons showing the Athenian Treasury and the Stoa of the Athenians at Delphoi, taken in August 2018. Gorgias reportedly dedicated a gold-plated statue of himself at Delphoi.
The Athenian comic playwright Aristophanes (lived c. 446 – c. 386 BCE) wrote a comedy in which he ruthlessly lampoons the sophists titled The Clouds, which was first performed in 423 BCE at the City Dionysia. The comedy was poorly received, so Aristophanes subsequently revised it at some point between c. 419 and c. 416 BCE for written circulation. It is Aristophanes’s later revised version of the play, which was probably never performed during his lifetime, that has survived to the present day.
In the comedy, Aristophanes portrays Socrates as a slippery and shifty sophist who promises to teach anyone how to make a false argument seem true and a true argument seem false through rhetorical trickery in exchange for a tuition fee. As a work of humor, The Clouds is a masterpiece—but it is also an egregious misrepresentation of both Socrates and the sophists.
The sophists almost certainly did not think of themselves as teaching their students how to make lies seem like the truth. Instead, they simply recognized the reality that, for better or worse, truth is often a matter of interpretation and it is possible for a skilled orator to make an argument that sounds convincing for virtually any position.
In the Greek world, especially in democratic city-states like Athens where so much of politics depended on citizens making persuasive oral arguments in the assembly, the ability to speak persuasively and make convincing arguments was an indispensable skill for any man who wanted to have any kind of involvement in politics or public life in general. Obviously, not everyone possessed this skill naturally and even those who had a knack for it could improve their abilities through training and practice. This inevitably created a public need for people who could teach others how to argue persuasively.
As men who believed they had mastered the art of making persuasive arguments through public speaking, the sophists made it their occupation to teach other people how to make persuasive arguments of their own. In other words, they were not (necessarily) a bunch of shifty charlatans who didn’t care a whiff about right or wrong, but rather men who made it their business to teach others a useful skill.
ABOVE: Sixteenth-century engraving depicting a scene from Aristophanes’s comedy The Clouds, in which Socrates is portrayed observing the skies in a bucket suspended from a tree
The distinction between sophists and philosophers
The word philosopher comes from the Greek word φιλόσοφος (philósophos), which is constructed from the epsilon-contract verb φιλέω (philéō), meaning “to love” or “to be fond of,” and the first-declension feminine noun σοφία (sophía), meaning “skill” or “wisdom.” The word therefore originally meant “lover of skill” or “lover of wisdom.”
Diogenes Laërtios in his Lives and Opinions of Eminent Philosophers 1.pr.12 cites the philosopher Herakleides Pontikos (lived c. 390 – c. 310 BCE) as having written in his treatise On the Woman Who Stopped Breathing that Pythagoras of Samos (lived c. 570 – c. 495 BCE) was the first person to call himself a φιλόσοφος. Whether this account is historically accurate is impossible to assess, since Herakleides Pontikos was writing well over a century after Pythagoras’s death and Diogenes Laërtios was writing even later.
In any case, regardless of how the term was originally coined, in the decades following the first performance of Aristophanes’s Clouds, Socrates’s students Plato and Xenophon (if not Socrates himself) sought to distance their beloved teacher Socrates and, by extension, themselves from the sophists by sharply distinguishing between sophists on the one hand and philosophers on the other. In doing this, they came to portray sophists in a manner similar to Aristophanes’s caricature: as devious hucksters who didn’t care about truth or morality, who openly taught their students how to convince people that lies were the truth, and who only cared about getting paid.
Plato absolutely skewers Gorgias in particular in his dialogue Gorgias, portraying him as a charlatan who knowingly exploits his talent for deceptive rhetoric to make himself seem like an expert in everything when he is really just willfully ignorant. He portrays Gorgias as saying in section 459c, in my own translation from the Greek:
“Therefore, isn’t it much convenience, Socrates, not learning the other skills, but only this one [i.e., rhetoric], to outdo any of the professionals?”
Plato and Xenophon had especially intense disdain for the regular practice of sophists charging tuition fees. Plato portrays Socrates in his Republic 6.493a-c as denouncing sophists who teach in exchange for payment, declaring that they only care about pleasing the ignorant masses. Plato’s Socrates declares, as translated by Paul Shorey:
“Each of these private teachers who work for pay, whom the politicians call sophists and regard as their rivals, inculcates nothing else than these opinions of the multitude which they opine when they are assembled and calls this knowledge wisdom. It is as if a man were acquiring the knowledge of the humors and desires of a great strong beast which he had in his keeping, how it is to be approached and touched, and when and by what things it is made most savage or gentle, yes, and the several sounds it is wont to utter on the occasion of each, and again what sounds uttered by another make it tame or fierce, and after mastering this knowledge by living with the creature and by lapse of time should call it wisdom, and should construct thereof a system and art and turn to the teaching of it, knowing nothing in reality about which of these opinions and desires is honorable or base, good or evil, just or unjust, but should apply all these terms to the judgements of the great beast, calling the things that pleased it good, and the things that vexed it bad, having no other account to render of them, but should call what is necessary just and honorable, never having observed how great is the real difference between the necessary and the good, and being incapable of explaining it to another.”
Xenophon portrays Socrates in his Memorabilia 1.6.13 as accusing teachers who charge tuition fees of being outright prostitutes. He says, as translated by Hugh Tredennick:
“In our society, Antiphon, the same rules with regard to what is creditable and what is not are thought to apply equally to the disposal of physical attractions and of wisdom. A man who sells his favours for a price to anyone who wants them is called a catamite; but if anyone forms a love-attachment with someone whom he knows to be truly good, we regard him as perfectly respectable. In just the same way, those who sell wisdom at a price to anyone who wants it are called sophists; but if anyone, by imparting any edifying knowledge that he possesses, makes a friend of one whom he knows to be naturally gifted, we consider that he is behaving as a truly good citizen should behave.”
As a current university student, I can definitely sympathize with Plato and Xenophon’s complaints against sophists charging tuition fees.
ABOVE: Photograph from Wikimedia Commons of a portrait head of the philosopher Plato based on a portrait head made by Silanion in around 370 BCE for the Akademia in Athens (left) and photograph from the Bibliotheca Alexandrina Antiquities Museum website of a portrait bust of Xenophon dating to c. 120 CE based on an earlier Greek original (right)
A case in favor of the sophists
On the other hand, it is worth pointing out that, unlike Plato and Xenophon, the sophists were actually working for a living. Plato and Xenophon both belonged to very wealthy, aristocratic Athenian families that owned significant areas of land and enslaved lots of people. They consequently did not need to charge students tuition fees because they could support themselves off the agricultural produce from the lands they owned—produce that was planted and harvested by the people whom they enslaved.
Aristotle, Plato’s most famous student, who also criticized the sophists, likewise belonged to an extremely wealthy family in Stageira, although he spent much of his time living abroad in Athens where he was not allowed to personally own land, since he was a μέτοικος (métoikos), which means “resident foreigner.”
Other people in the ancient world who wanted to teach and who did not have Plato, Xenophon, or Aristotle’s hereditary wealth, land, or enslaved people had little choice but to charge tuition fees in order to support themselves and make a living. Even sophists who came from very wealthy backgrounds were usually living abroad in other city-states far away from the estates they owned and, as metoikoi, they were prohibited from owning land in the places where they lived.
It’s also worth noting that the only sophists whose tuition rates are known are ones like Protagoras and Gorgias who were wildly famous and successful and who could presumably demand the highest rates. Other sophists who were less famous may have charged considerably lower tuition.
ABOVE: Photograph from Wikimedia Commons of an Attic black-figure neck amphora by the Antimenes Painter dating to between c. 530 and c. 510 BCE depicting people (probably enslaved people) gathering olives. Plato, Xenophon, and Aristotle all owned many enslaved people, who would have done most of the agricultural work on their estates.
For writers like Plato, Xenophon, and Aristotle, then, the distinction between a “φιλόσοφος” and a “σοφιστής” was, in some ways, one of class. A “φιλόσοφος” was an independently wealthy man of the leisure class who could afford to devote his time to studying philosophy and teaching students without demanding pay. Anyone else who had to find some way to make a living through teaching was a “σοφιστής.”
It may come as little surprise given what I have said that there was also a political divide between the sophists and the camp of Plato, Xenophon, and Aristotle. As I mentioned earlier, the sophists seem to have generally been in favor of democracy and opposed to oligarchy—surely not least because democracy created greater demand for their services.
Meanwhile, as I discuss in this post I wrote in December 2021, Plato, Xenophon, and Aristotle all held lukewarm attitudes toward democracy at best. Plato and Xenophon seem to have openly preferred oligarchy over democracy and the highest praise Aristotle was willing to give democracy was that it was the least awful of the constitutions he classified as degenerate.
Conclusion
By this point, I think several points have become clear; the sophists were a fairly diverse crew, but, in general, they tended to be relativistic, religiously unorthodox if not outright irreligious, pro-democratic, skeptical toward traditional values and ideas, and, above all, convinced of the power of rhetoric to persuade people for better or worse.
After reading all this, some people may still be convinced that the sophists were really the villains they’ve been made out to be. If so, that’s fair. I thought I would take this opportunity, though, to show a fuller picture of them than the caricature that has often been presented.
Seems like they were just hating on people who needed money to eat.
I think it is important to reiterate that, as I mention in the article, the most famous sophists were notorious for charging outlandishly high tuition fees. Big-name sophists like Protagoras and Gorgias were making bank; they were certainly making vastly more money than any of them needed simply to meet their basic needs.
At the same time, though, the sophists certainly had justification for charging fees in the first place and we must imagine that some of the smaller-name sophists who couldn’t attract as many wealthy students may very well have been struggling at times just to get by.
I mean every business has its fair of swindlers.
This was refreshing and informative. I’d never really considered how the difference between philosophers and sophists could also be understood as the difference between those who (while critiquing some received wisdom) believed in an absolute truth and inherent nobility and those who were willing to question even further. Interesting to think of Socrates and Plato as “the old guard” holding on to certainty and threatened by relativism.
One skill I’m trying to work on these days is tolerating uncertainty, so now I have new respect for the sophists. Thank you.
Great post. I learned a lot.
I think you’re being a little unfair to the critics, though. I could be misreading you, but at times you seem to think it’s just an unfortunate misunderstanding – seeing a bogeyman that isn’t there – rather than a major philosophical difference.
Extreme philosophical scepticism and relativism – and now postmodernism – often glory in their ability to challenge everything we think we know. So it’s hardly unreasonable for some to argue back strongly against this. Think about your most fundamental beliefs – that men and women or people of all races should have the same rights, or that the holocaust and gulags really happened, say – and you can quickly see why people coming along saying that these beliefs have no basis might not be taken lying down. Yes, there are two sides in any debate. But the more someone shows indifference to or contempt for the idea that you can actually evaluate between two arguments – for the idea that argument is a route to truth in any sense at all – the more they are saying philosophy and ethics and to some extent rational thought are a complete waste of time. This stance should of course be legal to express, but it’s hardly uncontroversial.
I think this example does get to the core of the problem with this kind of relativism or extreme scepticism, too – while some like to think it implies a kind of radical equality, it actually undermines any arguments against violence and oppression by one person or group over another. If “politically, the sophists seem to have usually been in favor of democracy and opposed to oligarchy” this would be in spite of these beliefs rather than because of them. ( And of course, different sophists may have taken difference stances.) There is no magic bullet that allows relativism to be used against beliefs we dislike but never against ones we cherish. The consistent relativist/extreme sceptic is not some kind of egalitarian liberal but a nihilist who thinks laws against genocide are a mere preference.
I don’t think the sophists were villains at all, but this post does make me (continue to) think they were mistaken.
Wow. Good points. More to ponder.
I should clarify that there are at least two different kinds of relativism, and we don’t know which kind the sophists were.
On the one hand, there is what we might call “hard” relativism, which is what you seem to interpret the sophists as espousing, which holds that there is no such thing as truth at all and whatever seems true to a person is true for them.
On the other hand, there is also a kind of “soft” relativism, which holds that there is such a thing as truth, but it can only be discovered through human faculties and, in many cases, it may be extremely difficult or impossible to know what that truth is, meaning that many people may have drastically different perspectives on the same issue and all those perspectives may be equally valid or equally likely to be correct.
I personally tend to suspect that at least Protagoras was probably more of a “soft” relativist than a “hard” relativist. His saying “A human being is the measure of all things” strongly suggests to me the idea that there is some kind of truth out there, but that truth is a matter of interpretation and each individual might “measure” that truth differently.
Protagoras presumably believed that it is possible for a person to be reasonably confident of some things. After all, one can only say “A human being is the measure of all things” if it is possible to know that “A human being is the measure of all things.” If there is no such thing as truth in any sense, then even the statement that there is no such thing as truth is itself meaningless. I don’t think that’s what Protagoras was arguing.
Very true. I’ve always recognized this, but some cultural relativists and such seem incapable of seeing the problem.
This by Peter sums up what I think about the matter.
“By this point, I think several points have become clear; the sophists were a fairly diverse crew, but, in general, they tended to be relativistic, religiously unorthodox if not outright irreligious, pro-democratic, skeptical toward traditional values and ideas, and, above all, convinced of the power of rhetoric to persuade people for better or worse.”
Leaving aside the claim about their democratic credentials (I wonder how we would fit Thrasymachus’s Trumpian claim, as cited by Plato, that “justice is only what’s in the advantage of the stronger”) and the fact that some were not just relativists, but actual nihilists, it’s not hard to see how some citizens of a society like late classical Athens, which saw through the destructive Peloponnesian War, the Thirty Tyrants etc. had no patience for this and saw these ideas as toxic and undermining the political and social fabric of the state.
This is especially obvious to someone like me who practices law. Like contemporary postmodernism, sophism like this is toxic if systematically applied to the text of the laws and the way courts work.
This was interesting! I did not know much about sophists in Classical Greece, and I was a bit surprised that you did not mention the “Second Sophistic” in the Roman period
The claim about Philosophers being independently wealthy fails badly when applied to Socrates, the one who insisted on the term so greatly. He’s well known for his extreme poverty. As well, his line of disciples that became the Cynics criticized Philosophers like Plato for their wealth. Just worth pointing out.
While it is true that Socrates does not seem to have been particularly wealthy himself, it is worth noting that he affiliated closely with Athenian aristocrats and, politically, seems to have been closely associated with oligarchy, which was mainly popular among the upper classes. Two of Socrates’s students, Kritias and Charmides, were not only wealthy aristocrats, but also became members of the Thirty Tyrants. Both of Socrates’s students whose writings have survived to the present day, Plato and Xenophon, seem to have favored oligarchy and seem to portray Socrates as favoring oligarchy as well.
It’s true that the Cynics disdained wealth, but the Cynics were unusual, and they belonged to a school of philosophy that was as at least as different from the philosophy of Plato as the philosophy of Plato was from the philosophy of the sophists. The rivalry between Plato and Diogenes is literally the stuff of legends. I highly doubt that Plato would have considered the Cynics true “philosophers” at all.