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2 ANCIENT AND MEDIEVAL SCHOOLS |
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The Sophists were certain Greek
lecturers, writers, and teachers in the 5th and 4th centuries BC, most of whom
travelled about the Greek-speaking world giving instruction in a wide range of
subjects in return for fees. |
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The term sophist (Greek sophistes)
had earlier applications. It is sometimes said to have meant originally simply
"clever" or "skilled man," but the list of those to whom
Greek authors applied the term in its earlier sense makes it probable that it
was rather more restricted in meaning. Seers, diviners, and poets predominate,
and the earliest Sophists probably were the "sages" in early Greek
societies. This would explain the subsequent application of the term to the Seven
Wise Men (7th-6th century BC), who typified the highest early practical
wisdom, and to Pre-Socratic philosophers generally. When Protagoras,
in one of Plato's dialogues (Protagoras,
317 a-b) is made to say that, unlike others, he is willing to call himself a
Sophist, he is using the term in its new sense of "professional
teacher," but he wishes also to claim continuity with earlier sages as a
teacher of wisdom. Plato and Aristotle altered
the meaning again, however, when they claimed that professional teachers such as
Protagoras were not seeking the truth but only victory in debate and were
prepared to use dishonest means to achieve it. This produced the sense
"captious or fallacious reasoner or quibbler," which has remained
dominant to the present day. Finally, under the Roman Empire the term was
applied to professors of rhetoric, to orators, and to prose writers generally,
all of whom are sometimes regarded as constituting what is now called the Second
Sophistic movement (see below The
Second Sophistic movement ). |
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The names survive of nearly 30 Sophists
properly so called, of whom the most important were Protagoras, Gorgias,
Antiphon, Prodicus,
and Thrasymachus. Plato protested strongly that Socrates
was in no sense a Sophist--he took no fees, and his devotion to the truth was
beyond question. But from many points of view he is rightly regarded as a rather
special member of the movement. The actual number of Sophists was clearly much
larger than 30, and for about 70 years, until c. 380 BC, they were the sole source of higher education in the more
advanced Greek cities. Thereafter, at least at Athens,
they were largely replaced by the new philosophic schools, such as those of
Plato and Isocrates. Plato's dialogue Protagoras
describes something like a conference of Sophists at the house of Callias in
Athens just before the Peloponnesian War. Antimoerus of Mende, described as one
of the most distinguished of Protagoras' pupils, is there receiving professional
instruction in order to become a Sophist (Protagoras, 315 a), and it is clear that this was already a normal
way of entering the profession. (see also education, history of ) |
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Most of the major Sophists were not
Athenians, but they made Athens the centre for their activities, although
travelling continuously. The importance of Athens was doubtless due in part to
the greater freedom of speech prevailing there, in part to the patronage of
wealthy men like Callias, and even to the positive encouragement of Pericles,
who was said to have held long discussions with Sophists in his house. But
primarily the Sophists congregated at Athens because they found there the
greatest demand for what they had to offer, namely, instruction to young men,
and the extent of this demand followed from the nature of the city's political
life. Athens was a democracy, and although its limits were such that Thucydides
could say it was governed by one man, Pericles, it nonetheless gave
opportunities for a successful political career to citizens of the most diverse
backgrounds, provided they could impress their audiences sufficiently in the
council and the assembly. After Pericles' death this avenue became the highroad
to political success. |
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The Sophists taught men how to speak and
what arguments to use in public debate. A
Sophistic education was increasingly sought after both by members of the oldest
families and by aspiring newcomers without family backing. The changing pattern
of Athenian society made merely traditional attitudes in many cases no longer
adequate. Criticizing such attitudes and replacing them by rational arguments
held special attraction for the young, and it explains the violent distaste
which they aroused in traditionalists. Plato thought that much of the Sophistic
attack upon traditional values was unfair and unjustified. But even he learned
at least one thing from the Sophists--if the older values were to be defended,
it must be by reasoned argument, not by appeals to tradition and unreflecting
faith. |
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Seen from this point of view, the
Sophistic movement was a valuable function of Athenian democracy in the 5th
century BC. It offered an education designed to facilitate and promote success
in public life. All of the Sophists appear to have provided a training in rhetoric
and in the art of speaking, and the Sophistic movement, responsible for large
advances in rhetorical theory, contributed greatly to the development of style
in oratory. In modern times the view
occasionally has been advanced that this was the Sophists' only concern. But the
range of topics dealt with by the major Sophists makes this unlikely, and even
if success in this direction was their ultimate aim, the means they used were
surely as much indirect as direct, for the pupils were instructed not merely in
the art of speaking, but in grammar; in the nature of virtue (arete)
and the bases of morality; in the history of society and the arts; in poetry,
music, and mathematics; and also in astronomy and the physical sciences.
Naturally the balance and emphasis differed from Sophist to Sophist, and some
offered wider curricula than others. But this was an individual matter, and
attempts by earlier historians of philosophy to divide the Sophistic movement
into periods in which the nature of the instruction was altered are now seen to
fail for lack of evidence. The 5th-century Sophists inaugurated a method of
higher education that in range and method anticipated the modern humanistic
approach inaugurated or revived during the Renaissance. |
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A question still discussed is whether
the Sophists in general had any real regard for truth or whether they taught
their pupils that truth was unimportant compared with success in argument.
Plato's hostile judgment on both counts is still frequently repeated without
question. The Platonic writings make frequent reference to what Plato calls "eristic"
(Greek eristikos, "fond of wrangling") and "antilogic";
the two often have been incorrectly treated as identical. Eristic, for Plato,
consists in arguments aimed at victory rather than at truth. Antilogic involves
the assignment to any argument of a counterargument that negates it, with the
implication that both argument and counterargument are equally true. Antilogic
in this sense was especially associated with Protagoras; but Plato, no doubt
correctly, attributes its use to other Sophists as well. He regards the use of
antilogic as essentially eristic, whether it be used to silence an opponent by
making his position seem self-contradictory, or whether it be used mechanically
to negate any proposition put forward in debate. He concludes that the
widespread use of antilogic is evidence that Sophists had no real regard for the
truth, which must itself be free from antilogic. |
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But Plato himself believed, for much or
possibly all of his life, that the phenomenal world was essentially antilogical
inasmuch as no statement about it could be made possessing a greater degree of
truth than the contradictory of that statement. For example, if a man is tall in
relation to one object, he will be short in relation to another object. In so
characterizing the phenomenal world, Plato certainly did not wish to be called
eristic--he regarded the application of antilogic to the description of the
phenomenal world as an essential preliminary to the search for the truth
residing in the Platonic Forms, which are themselves free from antilogic. (see
also appearance,
idea) |
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Seen in this perspective, the Sophistic
use of antilogic must be judged less harshly. To the extent that it was used
irresponsibly to secure success in debate it was eristic, and the temptation so
to use it must often have arisen. But where it was invoked in the sincere belief
that antilogic elements were indeed involved, or where it was used for analyzing
a complex situation in order to reveal its complexity, then antilogic was in no
way inconsistent with devotion to truth. This raises the question to what extent
the Sophists possessed any general view of the world or gave expression to any
genuine philosophical views, whether original or derived. Ancient writers,
influenced by Plato and Aristotle, seem to have excluded the Sophists, apart
from Protagoras, for their schematized accounts of early Greek thinkers. Modern
writers have frequently maintained that, whatever else they were, the Sophists
were in no sense philosophers. Even those who acknowledge the philosophical
interest of certain particular doctrines attributed to individual Sophists often
tend to regard these as exceptions and claim that, inasmuch as the Sophists were
not a school but only independent teachers and writers, as a class they were not
philosophers. Two questions are involved: whether the Sophists held common
intellectual doctrines and whether some or all of these could actually be termed
philosophical. |
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Among moderns, Hegel
was one of the first to reinsert the Sophists into the history of Greek
philosophy. He did so within the framework of his own dialectic,
in which every thesis invokes its own opposite, or antithesis; thus he treated
the Sophists as representing the antithesis to the thesis of the group of
philosophers known collectively as the Pre-Socratics. Pre-Socratics such as
Thales, Heracleitus, and Parmenides sought the truth about the external world
with a bold enthusiasm that produced a series of explanations, each claiming to
be correct. None of these explanations of the physical world paid attention to
the observer and each was driven to reject more and more of the phenomenal world
itself as unreal. Finally, with the Eleatics, a
5th-century school at Elea in Italy that held that reality is a static one, of
which Parmenides and Zeno are representatives, little or nothing of the
phenomenal world was left as real. This trend in turn produced a growing
distrust of the power of human beings to attain knowledge of the ultimate basis
of natural phenomena. Philosophy had reached an impasse, and there was a danger
of complete skepticism. Such an extreme position, according to Hegel's view,
provoked the "antithesis" of the Sophistic movement, which rejected
the "thesis" of the objectivists and concentrated attention upon man
rather than upon nature. To Hegel, the Sophists were subjective Idealists,
holding that reality is only minds and their contents, and so philosophy could
move forward by turning its attention to the subjective element in knowing.
Reflection upon the contrast between the thought of the Sophists and that of
their predecessors produced the "syntheses" of Plato and Aristotle.
(see also idealism) |
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Whether any of the Sophists actually
were subjective Idealists may be doubted. The conclusion depends in part on
whether Protagoras held that phenomena had subjective existence only, or whether
he thought that all things perceived had objective existence but were perceived
differently according to the nature of the percipient and their relation to
him--i.e., whether he interpreted
phenomena subjectively or relativistically. It is fairly clear, however, that
the Sophists did concentrate very largely upon man and human society, upon
questions of words in their relations to things, upon issues in the theory of
knowledge, and upon the importance of the observer and the subjective element in
reality and in the correct understanding of reality. |
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This emphasis helps to explain the
philosophical hostility of Plato and Aristotle. Particularly in the eyes of
Plato, anyone who looks for the truth in phenomena alone, whether he interprets
it subjectively or relativistically, cannot hope to find it there; and his
persistence in turning away from the right direction virtually amounts to a
rejection of philosophy and of the search for truth. Many a subsequent thinker
for whom metaphysics, or the investigation of
the deepest nature of reality, was the crowning achievement of philosophy has
felt with Plato that the Sophists were so antimetaphysical that they have no
claim to rank as philosophers. But in a period when, for many philosophers,
metaphysics is no longer the most important part of philosophy and is even for
some no part at all, there is growing appreciation of a number of problems and
doctrines recurring in the discussions of the Sophists in the 5th and 4th
centuries BC. In the 18th and early 19th centuries the Sophists were considered
charlatans. Their intellectual honesty was impugned, and their doctrines were
blamed for weakening the moral fibre of Greece. The charge was based on two
contentions, both correct: first, that many of the Sophists attacked the
traditionally accepted moral code; and second, that they explored and even
commended alternative approaches to morality that would condone or allow
behaviour of a kind inadmissible under the stricter traditional code. |
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Much less weight has been attached to
these charges since about the mid-19th century. First, many of the attacks on
the traditional morality were in the name of a new morality that claimed to be
of greater validity. Attacks upon particular doctrines often claimed that
accepted views should be abandoned as morally defective. Furthermore, even when
socially disfavoured action seemed to be commended, this was frequently done to
introduce a principle necessary in any satisfactory moral theory. Thus when
Thrasymachus in the first book of Plato's Republic
argues that justice is unwarranted when it merely contributes to another's
good and not to the good of the doer, Plato agrees. Finally, there is no
evidence that any of the Sophists were personally immoral or that any of their
pupils were induced to immoral actions by Sophistic teaching. The serious
discussion of moral problems and the theory of morality tends to improve
behaviour, not to corrupt it. (see also "Republic, The," ) |
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In addition to their teaching, the
Sophists wrote many books, the titles of which are preserved by writers such as
Diogenes Laërtius, who probably derived them from library catalogues. It
has usually been supposed that the writings themselves hardly survived beyond
the period of Plato and Aristotle, but this view requires modification in the
light of papyrus finds, admittedly few, that were copied from Sophistic writings
in the Christian Era. It also has been possible to identify in the works of
later writers certain imitations or summaries of 5th-century Sophistic writers,
whose names are unknown. The most important of these are the discussion of law
in the Protrepticus, or
"Exhortation to Philosophy," by the 3rd-century-AD Syrian Neoplatonist
Iamblichus, and the so-called Dissoi logoi found in the manuscripts of Sextus
Empiricus (3rd century AD). This evidence suggests that while most later
writers took their accounts of the Sophists from earlier writers, especially
from Plato, the original writings did in many cases survive and were consulted. |
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As part of his defense of the Sophists
against the charge of immoral teachings, the English historian George
Grote (1794-1871) maintained that they had nothing in common with each
other except their profession, as paid teachers qualifying young men to think,
speak, and act with credit to themselves as citizens. This denial of common
doctrines cannot be sustained--the evidence is against it. While the Sophists
were not a sect, with a set of obligatory beliefs or doctrines, they had a
common interest in a whole series of questions to which they sought to apply
solutions along certain clearly defined lines. |
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There are great difficulties, however,
in the precise reconstruction of individual Sophistic doctrines. No complete
writings survive from any of the Sophists to check the accounts found in Plato,
and later writers were often, but not always, dependent upon what they found in
Plato. Plato doubtless knew well the doctrines of individual Sophists; but he
was writing for those to whom these doctrines were already well known, and he
was always more interested in following the argument where it led than in
providing precise statements of other people's views for the sake of posterity.
Consequently, almost everything that is said about particular Sophistic
doctrines is subject to controversy. |
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Relativism and skepticism
have often been regarded as common features of the Sophistic movement as a
whole. But it was early pointed out that only in Protagoras and Gorgias
is there any suggestion of a radical skepticism about the possibility of
knowledge; and even in their case Sextus Empiricus, in his discussion of
skepticism, is probably right when he declares that neither was really a
skeptic. Protagoras does seem to have restricted knowledge to sense experience,
but he believed emphatically that whatever was perceived by the senses was
certainly true. This led him to assert that the tangent does not touch the
circle at a point only, but along a definite length of the circumference;
clearly he was referring to human perception of drawn tangents and circles.
Gorgias, who claimed that nothing exists, or if it does exist it cannot be
known, or if it exists and is knowable it cannot be communicated to another, has
often been accused of denying all reality and all knowledge. Yet he also seems
to have appealed in his very discussion of these themes to the certainty of
perceived facts about the physical world; e.g.,
that chariots do not race across the sea. Others dismiss his whole thesis as
a satire or joke against philosophers. (see also ethical
relativism) |
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Probably neither view is correct. What
Gorgias seems to have been attacking was not perceived reality nor one's power
to perceive it but the attempt to assign existence or nonexistence (with the
metaphysical implications of such an operation) to what we perceive around us.
There is evidence that other Sophists (e.g.,
Hippias) were interested in questions of this kind, and it is likely that
they were all concerned to some degree with rejecting claims of any nonsensible
existence, such as those of the Eleatics. The Sophists, in fact, were attempting
to explain the phenomenal world without appealing to any principles outside of
phenomena. They believed that this could be done by including the observer
within the phenomenal world. Their refusal to go beyond phenomena was, for
Plato, the great weakness in their thinking. |
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A second common generalization about the
Sophists has been that they represent a revolt against science and the study of
the physical world. The evidence is against this, inasmuch as for Hippias,
Prodicus, Gorgias, and Protagoras there are records of a definite interest in
questions of this kind. The truth is rather that they were in revolt against
attempts to explain the physical world by appeals to principles that could not
be perceived by the senses; and instead of framing new "objective"
explanations, they attempted to explain things, where explanation was required,
by introducing the perceiver as one element in the perceptual situation. (see
also appearance) |
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One of the most famous doctrines
associated with the Sophistic movement was the opposition between nature and custom
or convention in morals. It is probable that the antithesis did not originate in
Sophistic circles but was rather earlier; but it was clearly very popular and
figured largely in Sophistic discussions. The commonest form of the doctrine
involved an appeal from conventional laws to supposedly higher laws based on
nature. Sometimes these higher laws were invoked to remedy defects in actual
laws and to impose more stringent obligations; but usually it was in order to
free men from restrictions unjustifiably imposed by human laws that the appeal
to nature was made. In its extreme form the appeal involved the throwing off of
all restraints upon self-interest and the desires of the individual (e.g.,
the doctrine of Callicles in Plato's Gorgias
that might, if one possesses it, is actually right), and it was this, more
than anything else, that gave support to charges against the Sophists of immoral
teaching. On other occasions the terms of the antithesis were reversed and human
laws were explicitly acclaimed as superior to the laws of nature and as
representing progress achieved by human endeavour. In all cases the laws of
nature were regarded not as generalized descriptions of what actually happens in
the natural world (and so not like the laws of physics to which no exceptions
are possible) but rather as norms that people ought to follow but are free to
ignore. Thus the appeal to nature tended to mean an appeal to the nature of man
treated as a source for norms of conduct. (see also natural law) |
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To Greeks this appeal was not very
novel. It represented a conscious probing and exploration into an area wherein,
according to their whole tradition of thought, lay the true source for norms of
conduct. If Callicles in Plato's Gorgias represents
a position actually held by a living Sophist when he advocates free rein for the
passions, then it was easy for Plato to argue in reply that the nature of man,
if it is to be fulfilled, requires organization and restraint in the license
given to the desires of particular aspects of it; otherwise the interests of the
whole will be frustrated. Both Plato and Aristotle,
in basing so much of their ethics on the nature of man, are only following up
the approach begun by the Sophists. |
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The Sophists have sometimes been
characterized by their attacks on the traditional religious beliefs of the
Greeks. It is true that more than one Sophist seems to have faced prosecution
for impiety, as did Socrates also. Protagoras wrote "concerning the gods, I
cannot know either that they exist or that they do not exist nor what they are
like in form," and Prodicus offered a sociological account of the
development of religion. Critias went further when he supposed that the gods
were deliberately invented to inspire fear in the evildoer. It is thus probably
correct to say that the tendency of much Sophistic thought was to reject the
traditional doctrines about the gods. Indeed this follows almost inevitably if
the supposition is correct that all the Sophists were attempting to explain the
phenomenal world from within itself, while excluding all principles or entities
not discernible in phenomena. But in their agnostic attitudes toward the
Olympian deities the Sophists were probably at one with most of the Pre-Socratic
philosophers of the 6th and 5th centuries and also with most thinking people
living toward the end of the 5th century. It is thus probably misleading to
regard them as revolutionary in their religious beliefs. (see also Greek
religion) |
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The importance the Sophists attached to
man meant that they were extremely interested in the history and organization of
human societies. Here again most is known about Protagoras, and there is a
danger of treating his particular doctrines as typical of the Sophistic movement
as a whole. In the 5th century, human history was very commonly seen in terms of
a decline from an earlier golden age. Another view supposed that there were
recurring cycles in human affairs according to which a progression from good to
bad would give way to one from bad to good. The typical Sophistic attitude
toward society rejected both of these views in favour of one that saw human
history in terms of progress from savagery to civilization. In a famous myth Protagoras
explained how man achieved civilized society first with the aid of arts and
crafts and then by gaining a sense of respect and justice in the ordering of his
affairs. The general thinking of most of the Sophists seems to have been along
similar lines. (see also history,
philosophy of) |
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One of the most distinctive Sophistic
tenets was that virtue can be taught, a position springing naturally from the
Sophists' professional claim to be the teachers of young men. But the word virtue
(arete) implied both success in living
and the qualities necessary for achieving such success, and the claim that arete
could be taught by the kind of teaching that the Sophists offered had
far-ranging implications. It involved the rejection of the view that arete came only by birth--for example, by being born a member of a
noble family--and it involved also the rejection of the doctrine that arete
was a matter of the chance occurrence of specified qualities in particular
individuals. Arete, in the Sophists'
view, was the result of known and controllable procedures, a contention of
profound importance for the organization of society. Moreover, what can be
taught has some relation to what can be known and understood. The belief that
teaching of a high intellectual calibre could produce success both for the
individual and for governments has had a profound influence upon the subsequent
history of education. Once again, it is through the acceptance of this doctrine
by Plato and Aristotle that the Sophistic position came to be part of subsequent
humanist tradition. |
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It is a historical accident that the
name "Sophist" came to be applied to the Second Sophistic movement.
Greek literature underwent a period of eclipse during the 1st century BC and
under the early Roman Empire. But Roman dominance did not prevent a growing
interest in sophistic oratory in the Greek-speaking world during the 1st century
AD. This oratory aimed merely at instructing or interesting an audience and had
of necessity no political function. But it was based on elaborate rules and
required a thorough knowledge of the poets and prose writers of antiquity.
Training was provided by professional teachers of rhetoric who claimed the title
of Sophists, just as the 5th-century Sophists had adopted a name already used by
others. |
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The revival of the Greek spirit under
Hadrian and other emperors in the 2nd century AD who were also admirers of Greek
culture found expression in a fresh flowering of Greek prose following
principles developed and applied by the professors of rhetoric in the 1st
century AD. Hence a group of Greek prose writers in the 2nd century AD were
regarded as constituting the Second Sophistic movement. This was a
backward-looking movement that took as its models Athenian writers of the 5th
and 4th centuries BC; hence the label "Atticists"
(Greek Attikos, "Athenian")
applied to some of its leading members. The limits of the movement were never
clear. It is usually taken to include Polemon of Athens, Herodes Atticus, Aelius
Aristides, Maximus of Tyre, and the group of Philostrati. Dio Chrysostom of
Prusa is often included, although others would regard him as preparing the way
for the main period. Other writers, like Lucian, Aelian, and Alciphron, were
influenced by the movement even if not properly members of it; and the writers
of prose romances, such as Longus and Heliodorus, and the historians Dio Cassius
and Herodian are also associated with the general trend. By the 3rd century AD,
however, its impulse was weakening, and it was shortly no longer distinguishable
within the general stream of Greek literature. (G.B.K.) |
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