THE SOPHISTS

WEEK 2
 THE SOPHISTS
• Around 450 B.C., Athens became the cultural
center of the Greek world after Pericles
changed the old Oligarchy to Democracy
• The events that took place in Athens led to
philosophy to take a new direction
• A new group of philosophers shifted to the
study of human beings such as those that
relate to moral behaviour
 THE SOPHISTS
• The transition from predominantly scientific
concerns was explained in part by the failure
of Pre-Socratic philosophers (i.e. Milesians and
Eleatics) to arrive to any uniform conception
of the cosmos
• There was a social shift toward political power
and the study of rhetoric, it was no surprise,
then, that the next group of philosophers
were not really philosophers as such but
rhetoricians
 THE SOPHISTS
• Among these new philosophers were came to
be known as Sophists (“wise guys”) who came
to Athens as traveling teachers and
ambassadors
• They travelled from city to city, charging
admission to their lectures—lectures not on
the nature of reality or truth but on the nature
of power and persuasion
 THE SOPHISTS
• Protagoras, Gorgias, and Thrasymachus were
among the greatest of these Sophists
PROTAGORAS
 PROTAGORAS
• Perhaps the most famous of the Sophists was
Protagoras (ca. 490–ca. 422 B.C.E.)
• He taught that the way to achieve success is
through a careful and prudent acceptance of
traditional customs—not because they are
true, but because an understanding and
manipulation of them is expedient
 PROTAGORAS
• For Protagoras all customs were relative, not
absolute
• In fact, everything is relative to human
subjectivity
• Protagoras’s famous claim is homo mensura
— “man is the measurement of all things”
 PROTAGORAS
• “Man is the measurement of all things”- by
that he meant that the question whether a
thing is right or wrong, good or bad, must
always be considered in relation to a person’s
needs.
GORGIAS
 GORGIAS
• He seems to have wanted to dethrone
philosophy and replace it with rhetoric
• In his lectures and in a book he wrote, he
“proved” the following theses:
1. There is nothing.
2. If there were anything, no one could
know it.
3. If anyone did know it, no one could
communicate it.
 GORGIAS
• The point, of course, is that if you can “prove”
these absurdities, you can “prove” anything
• Gorgias is not teaching us some astounding
truth about reality; he is teaching us how to
win arguments, no matter how ridiculous our
thesis may be
THRASYMACHUS
 THRASYMACHUS
• He is known for the claim “Justice is in the
interest of the stronger.” That is to say, might
makes right
• According to him, all disputation about
morality is empty, except insofar as it is
reducible to a struggle for power
 THRASYMACHUS
• He further pointed out that “what is right is
the same everywhere, the interest of the
stronger party established in power”
 References
• Palmer, Donald. Looking at Philosophy: The
Unbearable Heaviness of Philosophy Made
Lighter. Fourth Edition. McGraw-Hill, 2008
• STUMPF, SAMUEL ENOCH, FROM SOCRATES
TO SARTRE: A History of Philosophy. New York
Mc Graw, 2008