884 Song of God
Song of God: see Bhagavadgı¯tā.
sophism. A sophism is a type of *fallacy that is not just an
error of reasoning, or an invalid argument, but a kind of
tactic of argumentation used unfairly to try to get the best
of a speech partner. Aristotle called these kinds of tactics
sophistici elenchi, or sophistical refutations. For an example
of a sophism, see the entry ‘straw man fallacy’. d.n.w.
*fallacy.
Douglas Walton, The Place of Emotion in Argument (University
Park, Penn., 1992).
Sophists. Itinerant professors of higher education. From its
original senses of ‘sage’ and ‘expert’ (lit. ‘one who is wise’,
from sophizesthai, cognate with sophos) the word came to
be applied in the fifth century bc in the technical sense given
above to a number of individuals who travelled widely
through the Greek world, giving popular lectures and spe-
cialized instruction in a wide range of topics. They were in
no sense a school, or even a single movement. They had
neither a common set of doctrines nor any shared organ-
ization, and while our evidence indicates that some of them
knew one another, their attitude to one another was rather
that of professional rivals than colleagues.
Their intellectual activities included the popularization
of the Ionian tradition of inquiry into nature (which was
concurrently being developed by more original thinkers
such as Anaxagoras and the *Atomists) and mathematics.
The polymath Hippias included both in his range of expert-
ise, and Protagoras is reported to have written a work on
mathematics, which may have included criticism of math-
ematics from the standpoint of his subjectivist epistemol-
ogy. The fifth century saw the development of what might
broadly be called the ‘social sciences’ of history, geog-
raphy, and speculative anthropology, as represented, for
example, by the works of Hecataeus, Herodotus, and
Thucydides; Hippias and probably Protagoras were also
active in these fields. Another significant development in
this period was the systematic study of techniques of per-
suasion and argument, which included the beginnings of
the study of language in various forms, including gram-
mar, literary criticism, and semantics. In all these areas
Protagoras seems to have been a pioneer; he was reputedly
the first person to write a treatise on techniques of argu-
ment, and was notorious for his claim, reported by Aristotle,
to be able to ‘make the weaker argument the stronger’, a
claim apparently based on the view that to every thesis
there was opposed an equipollent contrary thesis. If all
these have equal evidential support (a thesis logically inde-
pendent of, but doubtless psychologically connected with,
the famous doctrine that ‘Man is the measure of all things’
(cf. Protagoras)), then it is an appropriate task for the tech-
nique of persuasion to devise arguments on either side suf-
ficient for their political or forensic function.
This side of their activities brought the Sophists into the
public arena, where it is clear that they aroused strong
reactions, both positive and negative. On the positive side,
the long and financially highly successful careers of the
most celebrated testify to a considerable demand for their
services, both in satisfying the educational aspirations of
the well-off, especially in Athens, then at the height of its
prosperity and political and cultural influence, and in pro-
viding rhetorical and forensic training for aspiring polit-
icians. On the negative side, they were regarded as socially
and morally subversive, especially by those of conserva-
tive views. Suspicion focused both on their naturalistic
outlook, especially in its application to morality and the-
ology, and on their teaching of techniques of argument,
which could be seen as encouraging those who acquired
them, especially the young, to subvert sound morality and
hallowed tradition by clever cavilling. The caricature of
sophistic education given by Aristophanes in his Clouds
brings the two points together; Socrates, who is presented
as the representative of sophistry, first replaces the trad-
itional gods by naturalistic processes such as ‘Swirl’, and
then provides his pupils with arguments, including argu-
ments from the non-existence of the gods, to the conclu-
sion that they can welsh on their debts. Criticisms of
traditional theology were not, indeed, introduced by or
restricted to the Sophists. In the previous century Xeno-
phanes had ridiculed anthropomorphism and maintained
the existence of a single cosmic deity, and Heraclitus had
castigated certain rituals as absurd and obscene, and that
tradition was continued by Plato’s demand for the sup-
pression of all mythical accounts of divine wrongdoings.
In the fifth century we see the rise of a climate of thought
which casts doubt on religion itself, either on epistemo-
logical grounds, as in Protagoras’ agnostic writings, or by
providing naturalistic explanations of the celestial phe-
nomena traditionally regarded as divine, and of the origins
of religion itself. Anaxagoras famously taught that the sun
was a molten rock, while Prodicus (otherwise chiefly
known for his technique of distinguishing near-synonyms,
parodied in Plato’s Protagoras) is said to have maintained
that the gods were either personifications of natural
objects of special importance in human life, e.g. the sun, or
benefactors of earlier generations deified after death.
In this climate of thought, morality was no more
immune from critical scrutiny than was religion. Various
positions may be distinguished. Protagoras maintained
(apparently inconsistently with his universal subject-
ivism) a form of *moral relativism, in which moral beliefs
are true for those communities in which they are main-
tained. Plato’s dialogues provide evidence of more radical
challenges to morality associated with Sophists. In the
Republic the Sophist Thrasymachus (a historical person)
argues that, since it is contrary to self-interest to accept the
constraints of morality, immorality is a virtue and moral-
ity a defect (*aretē; *eudaimonia), while in the Gorgias
Callicles, a pupil of Gorgias, maintains yet more radically
that conventional morality is in fact a form of injustice,
since it attempts to deprive the strong of their natural right
to exploit the weak. It is, however, over-simplified to
regard the Sophists collectively as having had a common
doctrine, or even as having shared a generally sceptical or

radical outlook on morality. Xenophon, for instance,
reports Hippias as maintaining the traditional doctrine
that there exist certain natural laws, e.g. that one should
worship the gods and honour one’s parents, which are
common to all societies, while Protagoras, in Plato’s dia-
logue of that name, holds that the educational function of
the Sophist is continuous with that of the traditional edu-
cational institutions of the community, namely, to impart
the basic social virtues of justice and self-control.
The writings of the Sophists, which were in some cases
voluminous, are lost, with the sole exception of a substan-
tial papyrus fragment from a work by Antiphon, critical of
conventional morality on the grounds of its conflict with
self-interest. The principal source of our information is
Plato, who is a hostile witness, partly on the grounds that
he believed the Sophists to have claimed an educational
role to which they were not entitled, perhaps even more
because he believed, very probably truly, that the suspi-
cion which certain Sophists had attracted had contributed
to the unpopularity and ultimately to the condemnation of
Socrates, whose critical stance and destructive methods of
argument were no doubt hard to distinguish from typ-
ically Sophistic tactics. Plato is therefore at pains to depict
the Sophists as bogus practitioners of philosophy, in con-
trast to Socrates, the paradigm of true philosophy. The
gravamen of his charge is not that they were subversive
(though, as pointed out above, he does reflect that aspect),
but that they pretended to knowledge that they did not
possess, and that they sought popularity and success by
dressing up popular prejudices with a specious appearance
of novelty. At the same time his portrayal of Protagoras in
the Protagoras and his detailed critique of his subjectivism
in the Theaetetus show that he regarded him as a figure of
major intellectual stature (his portrayals of some other
Sophists are decidedly less friendly). The complexity of
Plato’s attitudes should remind us of the complexity of the
subject, and put us on our guard against uncritical accept-
ance of an over-simplified stereotype. c.c.w.t.
R. Bett, ‘The Sophists and Relativism’, Phronesis (1989).
W. K. C. Guthrie, A History of Greek Philosophy, iii (Cambridge,
1969).
G. B. Kerferd, The Sophistic Movement (Cambridge, 1981).
—— (ed.), The Sophists and their Legacy, Hermes Einzelschriften
xliv (Wiesbaden, 1981).
Sorabji, Richard Ruston Kharsedji (1934– ). Based in
London and Oxford, Sorabji has written widely on all
periods of ancient Greek philosophy, linking it with con-
temporary issues, especially in metaphysics, philosophy of
mind, and ethics, and contributing substantially to the cur-
rent revival of post-Aristotelian philosophy. In this last
respect he has aimed to take the story beyond the Stoics
and Epicureans, where it usually stops, to the end of Greek
philosophy around ad 600, thereby showing its continuity
with the succeeding philosophies of the Arabs, the Middle
Ages, and the Renaissance. In particular he has used
ancient writers to support the claims that causation is
more closely linked to explanation than to necessitation,
Sosa, Ernest 885
and that time could in principle be circular, so that any
given event may lie both in the past and in the future. He
is the originator and general editor of a major edition, in
English translation, of the ancient commentators on Aris-
totle. He is also concerned with the rationality of animals,
both in ancient thinkers and in fact. a.r.l.
Richard Sorabji, Time, Creation and the Continuum (London,
1983).
Sorel, Georges (1847–1922). It was only after his retire-
ment from working for the French government as an engin-
eer that Sorel began to publish the idiosyncratic views on
politics which have earned him a permanent, if minor,
place in the annals of revolutionary theory. Drawn ini-
tially to an ethical interpretation of Marxism and the
reformist ideas of Bernstein, he became disillusioned fol-
lowing the Dreyfus affair and emerged as the leading
exponent of revolutionary *syndicalism. In his most
famous work, Reflections on Violence (1906), Sorel argued
that the main doctrines of Marxism, and in particular the
general strike, should be seen as myths capable of inspir-
ing the working class to violent acts of revolution that
alone would be capable of effecting a fundamental trans-
formation of society. Towards the end of his life Sorel
became an admirer of Lenin and, to a lesser extent, of
Mussolini. d.mcl.
*violence, political.
Isaiah Berlin, ‘Georges Sorel’, in Against the Current (Oxford, 1979).
Jeremy Jennings, George Sorel: The Development and Character of his
Thought (London, 1985).
sorites paradox: see heap, paradox of the.
sortal. A type of term, usually a noun, e.g. ‘cat’ or ‘person’,
that supplies a single principle of individuating and count-
ing the instances it applies to. A sortal contrasts with
characterizing terms, e.g. ‘red’, with material names, e.g.
‘butter’, and with terms like ‘thing’, ‘action’, ‘place’, none of
which, unless variously completed (as in ‘red chair’ ‘pat of
butter’, the place we are in), supply such a principle. s.w.
*individuation.
P. F. Strawson, Individuals (London, 1959), esp. 168.
S. Wolfram, Philosophical Logic (London, 1989), ch. 6.2.2.
Sosa, Ernest (1940– ). Romeo Elton Professor of Natural
Theology at Brown University, recognized for contribu-
tions in epistemology, metaphysics, and the philosophy of
mind. Sosa is best known for ‘virtue perspectivism’, an
attempt to reconcile traditional ‘coherentist’ and ‘founda-
tionalist’ epistemological concerns. On this view, whether
a belief constitutes knowledge depends both on how it
was produced and on the believer’s perspective on his
own situation as knower. To be candidates for know-
ledge, beliefs must be products of truth-conducive intellec-
tual virtues. Elsewhere, Sosa argues that belief (de re)
about a referent is a kind of propositional belief that picks
out its object from the believer’s perspective, some propos-
itions being ‘indexical’ and perspective-dependent. Sosa