The Sophists and Socrates

The Sophists

Background

• Called Sophists, or “intellectuals”
• Most were not Athenians—traveling teachers/ambassadors = came from different cultures
• Interested in prose, grammar, and discourse
• Educators and lecturers: Trained Athenians in religion, grammar, and the interpretation of the poets
• Professed to teach rhetoric (the art of persuasive speech) = VERY important

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Method

• shifted concerns of philosophy to humankind
• preoccupied themselves with questions relating more directly to human behavior—basic ethical questions
• concerned themselves with the problem of human knowledge—to discover universal truth
• stemmed from a skepticism about the ability of human reason to discover the truth about nature
• skeptical about attaining any absolute truth by which society might order its life
• Hellenic culture based upon artificial rules or nature

Reception

• Reputation was favorable at first
• Good vs. bad persuasion
• Worry that rhetoric would allow people to procure things and outcomes for self-serving purposes
• Charged fees for their teaching and sought out the rich

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Protagoras

“Man is the measure of all things, of the things that are, that they are, and of the things that are not, that they are not”

Protagoras - Knowledge

• Knowledge is limited to one’s human capacities, what one perceives
• Knowledge is limited to our various perceptions and these perceptions differ with each person
• No standard for testing one’s perceptions; differentiating between “appearance” and “reality”
• Therefore, impossible to discover “true” nature of things
• Knowledge relative to each person

Protagoras - Morals

• Moral judgments are relative
• No uniform law of nature pertaining to human behavior that could be adopted by all peoples
• Laws and moral rules based upon convention
• People should respect and uphold the customs, laws, and moral rules that their tradition has nurtured
• SKEPTICISM

Gorgias

“There is no truth at all”

Gorgias

• Came to Athens as an ambassador of Leontini, Sicily
• Denied that there is any truth at all
• Notions:
• Nothing exists
• If anything exists, it is incomprehensible
• Even if it is comprehensible, it cannot be communicated
• No reliable knowledge/truth
• Abandoned philosophy; turned to rhetoric
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Thrasymachus

“Injustice pays”

Thrasymachus

• Life of injustice
• Unjust person superior in character and intelligence to just person
• “injustice pays”
• “might is right”

Socrates

“The unexamined life is not worth living”

General Information

• Lived from 470-399 B.C.E.
• First great Athenian philosopher
• Never wrote
• Is known through his student, Plato, who made Socrates the main character of all of his 39 “Dialogues” or books
• Not a Sophist; one of their keenest critics

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Socrates as Critic

• While Sophists were skeptics who believed that equally good arguments could be advanced on either side of an issue. Socrates was committed to the pursuit of truth
• Unlike the Sophists, believed that knowledge was stable and certain, not relative, uncertain, and unreliable
• “knowledge is virtue” – “to know the good is to do the good”

Socrates as Philosopher

• Analyzed any and every subject, especially ethics
• Delphic Oracle declared that there was no man wiser than Socrates
• “Well I am certainly wiser than this man. It is only too likely that neither of us has any knowledge to boast of; but he thinks that he knows something which he does not know, whereas I am quite conscious of my ignorance. At any rate it seems that I am wiser than he is to this small extent, that I do not think that I know what I do not know.”
(Plato, Apology)

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The Socratic Method

• Method of learning through questions
• Taught orally through dialogue/conversation
• By working through a series of questions, Socrates believed people could discover basic nature of life
• He would ask people to explain a concept, point out flaws that would force them to alter their answer, and continue like this until the person either came up with a solid explanation or admit that they really don’t understand the concept.

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Socrates’ Death

• Died by drinking hemlock, after being jailed for “corrupting youth,” “worshipping false gods”
• Believed strongly in the principle of laws