Sophists Essay ⋆ Political Science Essay Examples ⋆ EssayEmpire

The Sophists were itinerant teachers for hire who taught how to argue effectively and to advance interests in judicial, civic, and business forums in Greece, especially in Athens, largely during the second half of the fifth century BCE. It is clear from the texts of contemporaries that the Sophists played leading roles in articulating important trends that both arose from major Athenian and Greek advances during the period and challenged traditional views and customs. A robust classical democracy was put together in Athens by 458, and after the Greeks repulsed the Persians in 478, for about half a century Athens accumulated what amounted to an empire, making itself the centre of commerce, power, and culture in Greece and the region. The Peloponnesian War between Athens and Sparta began in 431 and ended with the defeat of Athens in 404, bringing to a close what some have called the Age of the Sophists. The most famous Sophists include Protagoras, Gorgias, and Thrasymachus.

The term sophist originally meant possessor of skill or wisdom, but in the fifth century the term also meant strategic cleverness. The ability to advance one’s interests in various forums was essential, and the Sophists taught the requisite rhetorical skills. Occasionally they displayed their skills for fees in large public demonstrations in which they might make weaker arguments defeat stronger ones, for example. In general, students who could afford individual instruction were taught how to use discourse as a means to their ends—how to defeat any suit brought against them in court, for example—as well as complementary intellectual views, often with relativistic implications, which challenged traditional religion and morality. According to the most extreme of their views, the reason why most people are law abiding is that they are weak, whereas a few powerful individuals pursue their own interests according to their natures regardless of social conventions such as law—this is and ought to be the way of the world.

Very little of what individual Sophists taught has come down to us except as reported in the works of others, most notably in the dialogues of Plato, who criticized their views through his favorite character Socrates, modeled on his admired teacher by the same name who lived during the age of the sophists. Socrates often debated leading figures in Athens and showed by argument that the strong and powerful could not defend their views against the criticisms of inconsequential figures such as himself. He attracted an audience and seemed to some to be a Sophist, but the pursuit of knowledge was for him an end in itself, not a means to personal gain.

Reacting against the pre-Socratics—the first philosophers in the Western tradition—whose various attempts to account for “all things” rationally according to underlying natural principles led to so many counterintuitive and mutually inconsistent conclusions, the Sophists turned to apparent political reality and what individuals could accomplish in it. Plato and Aristotle defined themselves against the Sophists to a great degree and developed the deeply universal and antirelativist moral and political philosophies that were to dominate much of the Western intellectual tradition.

Bibliography:

Cooper, John M., ed. Plato: Complete Works. Indianapolis: Hackett, 1997.
Guthrie,William K. C. A History of Greek Philosophy, Volume III: The Fifth-century Enlightenment. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1969.

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