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The Sophists and Socrates

The Sophists

The enterprise of the early philosophers started to be put into doubt (different theories
led to opposite conclusions)
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These were “itinerant professors,
who moved from city to city lecturing on various topics, including grammar, the
interpretation of poets, the philosophy of mythology, religion and most importantly,
rhetoric (the study of the ways of using language effectively)”
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The change from the Presocratics to the Sophists can be explained with reference to:
a
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A change in the method employed
c
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On the other hand, the Sophists shifted the focus to man; thus they
can be called anthropologists (this applies to Socrates too)
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The Sophists, on the other hand, sought to accumulate a large number of
facts, and from these, they moved to draw conclusions, partly theoretical, partly
practical
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The Presocratics were for truth, while the sophists were for effectiveness and
success (moreover they believed that objective truth was not possible)
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In the Protagoras he is depicted as saying that certain
ethical tendencies are implanted in all man, however, applied differently in different
societies (this is shown by the fact that laws varied from one society to another) - one
cannot say that one legal code is truer than another
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– in other words those things that were useful to them and gave
them food
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men started worshipping gods like Demeter (the goddess of harvest), Dionysius/
Hephaestus (the god of technology, blacksmiths, craftsmen, artisans, sculptors, metals,
metallurgy, fire and volcanoes)
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He held that a) nothing exists, b) if something exists
we cannot know it, c) if we can know it, we cannot communicate it to others
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However, some
argue that these claims by Gorgias were simply a rhetorical exercise
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He argued that people only speak of justice in
order to secure their own power and accepts this as a natural tendency, a fact which
has to be exploited to further personal interests
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Socrates never wrote
anything, and so everything we know about his teaching, we know it through the
writings of others
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The major difficulty for a
reconstruction of the thoughts of Socrates is that these people sometimes recount
contrasting views
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Induction means deriving a general/universal principle from a number of particulars
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Socrates search for universal definitions can be
contrasted to the Sophists‟ relativistic doctrines
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During a conversation, Socrates asks the interlocutor (someone who is engaged in a
dialogue) to define a concept
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For example,
Socrates might ask, 'what is justice?' (Socrates would profess to be ignorant in the
subject matter)
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Socrates would then point out the inadequacy of the definition given
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For example, „is
it unjust to deceive? Yes
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Socratic irony - this is Socrates' profession of ignorance
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On the one hand, this is a playful allusion to his
mother, but on the other hand, and most importantly, he helped others to give birth to
true ideas
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Socrates equated knowledge with virtue (moral optimism) - he who knows what is
right will also do what is right
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This can be called
ethical intellectualism, i
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the identification of the ethical with the intellectual
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From the identification of knowledge with virtue it follows that there is one virtue, i
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insight into what is truly good for man
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