Bibliographies: 'Sophists' – Grafiati (2024)

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Abstract The overview of Sophistic proposed by Philostratus in the introduction to the Lives of the Sophists creates a serious problem of interpretation. The system of two Sophistics: Old Sophistic and Second Sophistic as the author of the Lives defines them, appears to involve weaknesses and contradictions which bring into question the credibility of Philostratus. One might therefore believe that the Philostratean sysem of two Sophistics, through its apparent incoherence, in no way clarifies the question of the definition of a sophist. This article proposes, in contrast, to make visible the conception of Sophistic that hides behind the opposition between Old Sophistic and Second Sophistic, by analysing the introduction and the preface of the Lives of the Sophists.

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There is no category of thought more deliberately or explicitly relegated to a subordinate role in Plato’s dialogues than Sophists and sophistry. It is due to Plato’s influence that terms “sophist” and “sophistry” handed down to us have unilaterally negative associations—synonymous with lies and deception, obscurantism and false reasoning. There are several reasons to be dubious of this standard view of the Sophists and their practices. The primary reason addressed in this essay is that the surviving fragments of the Sophists do not accord with this standard view, a discrepancy that is particularly acute in the case of the 5th-century sophist Protagoras. This essay attends to Protagoras’s doctrines concerning antilogos, the sophistic practice of contradiction and negation. I contend that sophistic antilogos was a paradoxical practice that embodied metaphysical stakes for language and discourse. I challenge the standard view of Sophists and their antilogos by reconstructing a speculative counter-definition: a method for instantiating through language an ontology of flux and becoming over and against what would come to be a Platonist metaphysics of enduring, pure Being. I do this through a comparative analysis of Protagoras and the second century C.E. South Asian Buddhist thinker, Nāgārjuna.

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The article explores the legacy of Miguel de Unamuno, one of the most prominent Spanish intellectuals of the late 19th and ear-ly 20th centuries. Unamuno was known not only as a writer, but also as a philosopher, philologist, journalist, playwright, social activist, and educator with unique and innovative ideas for his time. The focus is on his statements about the activity of the sophists, literary and rhetorical sophistry, as well as the sophisti-cal concept of education in general. The key question is who the sophists were for Unamuno: wise men working for the benefit of the city or verbal craftsmen creating an educational danger for the citizens? In his essay “On Consequence and Sincerity”, where he discusses philosophical issues, Unamuno turns to the sphere of sophistical activity. He believed that there is a danger of be-coming dependent on some authority (sometimes false) both in education and politics. Students, like voters, are made to believe in someone else's truth, so is there not a sophist inside the teach-er and politician? Unamuno supports his point of view with an example of a man who hated politics but fell in love with the doctrines presented by his teacher. In his essay “The Exploitation of the Intelligent”, where Unamuno reflects on deceivers, he ar-gues that a sophist may win in foolish verbal tournaments but not in calm and thorough written discussions. Based on his corpus of philosophical and pedagogical essays, one can conclude that Unamuno had an ambiguous attitude towards the sophists and sophistical education. By saying that he always saw a sophist in the depths of every dogmatist and a dogmatist in the depths of every sophist, Unamuno asserts that if he had to choose, he would undoubtedly choose a sophist. It is difficult to classify Miguel de Unamuno as either an opponent or a supporter of the sophists; rather, he sympathizes with them, using their activities to construct his arguments, which sometimes resemble sophistic ones.

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To examine the sophists and their legacy, it is necessary to reconsider the relation between Socrates and the sophists. The trial of Socrates in 399 BCE seems to have changed people’s attitudes towards and conceptions of the sophists drastically, because Socrates was the first and only “sophist” executed for being a sophist. In the fifth century BCE, people treated natural philosophy, sophistic rhetoric and Socratic dialogue without clear distinctions, often viewing them as dangerous, impious and damaging to society. After the trial of Socrates, however, Plato sharply dissociated Socrates from the sophists and treated his teacher as a model philosopher and the latter as fakes, despite many common features and shared interests between them. While Plato’s distinction was gradually accepted by his contemporaries and by subsequent thinkers through the fourth century BCE, some disciples of Socrates and the second generation of sophists continued to pride themselves on being sophists and philosophers at the same time. Thus, this paper argues that Socrates belonged to the sophistic movement before Plato dissociated him from the other sophists, although the trial of Socrates did not immediately eliminate confusion between the sophist and the philosopher. The reconstructed view of the contemporaries of Socrates and Plato will change our conception of the sophists, as well as of Socrates. Finally, the paper examines the relation of Socrates to Antiphon of Rhamnus. Plato deliberately ignored this Athenian sophist because he was a shadowy double of Socrates in democratic Athens.

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This essay provides an introduction to the question of the contribution of the ancient sophists to aesthetics in Western art. It commences by examining the persistent analogies to visual arts in negative and positive discussions of sophistry, both philosophical and rhetorical, and proceeds to examine sophistic rhetoric in Gorgias, Aristides, Lucian, Philostratus and Byzantine ekphrasis, culminating with Philostratus’ discussions of mimesis and phantasia in Apollonius of Tyana. The discussions of the relation of being and nonbeing in Gorgias’ On Nonbeing and in Plato’s Sophist form the ontological core of sophistic claims about imaginative invention and the sophistic advancement of voluntary illusion (apatē) as a means to poetic “justice” or “truth”. Such claims should be considered in the light of the epistemological and ontological skepticism propounded by Gorgias. Although the opprobrium attached to sophistry obscures its later influence, we can nevertheless discern a sophistic aesthetic tradition focused on the reflective reception of artworks that re-emerges in the Renaissance. In the last section, I adumbrate the lines of study for examining a sophistic Renaissance in the visual arts, with attention to antiquarianism as an area where the significance of the beholder’s imaginative projection suggests the endurance—or revitalization—of sophistic aesthetics.

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Ever since Plato, the Sophists have been seen as teaching “the art of persuasion”, particularly the art (or skill) of persuasive speaking in the lawcourts and the assembly on which success in life depended. I argue that this view is mistaken. Although Gorgias describes logos as working to persuade Helen, he does not present persuasion as the goal of his own work, nor does any other Sophist see persuasion as the primary aim of his logoi. Most sophistic discourse was composed in the form of antilogies (pairs of opposed logoi), in which category I include works like Helen where the other side - the poetic tradition Gorgias explicitly cites as his opponent - is implicitly present. The purpose of these works is primarily to display skill in intellectual argument, as well as to give pleasure. Persuasion may be a goal of some sophistic works, but it is not their primary goal; and teaching the art of persuasion was not a major concern of the Sophists.

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This essay aims to reveal the relationship between sophistry and law in a twofold direction: on one side, how the development of ancient Greek law influenced sophistry’s production, and on the other, how and to what extent the knowledge and skills developed by sophists contributed to the development of legal expertise in classical Athens. The essay will initially focus on the historiographical category of the sophists to identify a line that connects these intellectuals to the new vision of society, the democratic polis, and the community that presides over legal and judicial life. This section will show that we can indeed speak of a “sophistic movement” in light of the structuring role of antilogies (antilogiae, or antithetical arguments) in forensic rhetoric. The rest of the essay will examine, from a theoretical point of view, sophistic methods of argument that contributed to the development of ancient Greek law. Touching on the issues of opposition, the debate, the reductio ad absurdum, and the principle of non-contradiction, the essay will highlight the relevance of sophistic thought to the judicial field and, more generally, the legal arena, in ancient Athens, so much so that one can think of the sophists as advocates of a particular legal culture.

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Barbara Cassin's Jacques the Sophist: Lacan, Logos, and Psychoanalysis, recently translated into English, constitutes an important rereading of Lacan, and a sustained commentary not only on his interpretation of Greek philosophers, notably the Sophists, but more broadly the relationship between psychoanalysis and sophistry. In her study, Cassin draws out the sophistic elements of Lacan's own language, or the way that Lacan ‘philosophistizes’, as she puts it. This article focuses on the relation between Cassin's text and her better-known Dictionary of Untranslatables, and aims to show how and why both ‘untranslatability’ and ‘performativity’ become keys to understanding what this book is not only saying, but also doing. It ends with a series of reflections on machine translation, and how the intersubjective dynamic as theorized by Lacan might open up the possibility of what is here termed a ‘translatorly’ mode of reading and writing.

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Though Plato’s Euthydemus is usually interpreted as an unambiguous attempt to discredit the sophists’ teaching methods, I argue that the dialogue defends the role sophists play in philosophic education. Read in its dramatic context, the dialogue reveals that sophists offer a low-stakes environment for the testing and development of an important political virtue: moderation. The sophist’s classroom facilitates the cultivation of moderation by simulating the agonistic conditions of the assembly or courtroom, where many encounter temptations to bully others verbally. By arousing one’s inner bully, the sophists expose the limits of one’s moderation. While not sufficient for developing moderation, such self-revelations constitute a necessary part of the process even for a philosopher like Socrates. Ironically, by bringing out the worst in their students, the sophists unknowingly supply a protreptic to philosophy.

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This article addresses the unusually elaborate dramatic context in Plato’s Protagoras and effect of sophistry on democratic Athens. Because Socrates evokes Odysseus’ κατάβασις in the Odyssey to describe the sophists in Callias’ house (314c-316b), I propose that Socrates depicts the sophists as bodiless shades residing in Hades. Like the shades dwelling in Hades with no connection to embodied humans on Earth, the sophists in the Protagoras are non-Athenians with no consideration for the democratic body of the Athenian πόλις. I conclude that sophistry can be detrimental to Athenian democracy because it can produce education inequality founded on wealth inequality.

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My thesis is on the epistemology of the sophist Protagoras. Through the reading of Plato' Theaetetus and Protagoras, I have reconstructed (a) Protagorean theory of knowledge, according to which Protagoras is an inter-subjectivist (as far as perceptions are concerned) and a moral relativist (as far as ethical judgements are concerned).In Chapter 1,1 first try to reconstruct the development of Protagoras' life. I list then Protagoras' few (extant) fragments, offering their different interpretations. Lastly, I deal with modern and most recent scholarship on Protagoras, ending the chapter with some considerations about the scholarly legitimacy of my thesis. In chapters 2 and 3, I deal with the Protagorean section in Plato's Theaetetus. Through a detailed (and critical) analysis of Plato's exegesis of Protagoras' maxim "Man is the measure of all things", I first reconstruct the perceptual (and individualistic) side of Protagoras' epistemology and then the ethical (and collective) side of such an epistemology. At the end of chapter 3, Protagoras' theory of knowledge already reveals itself as a rather complete epistemology. Such a (complete) picture of Protagoras' epistemology is reinforced in chapter 4, which deals with the Great Speech (mainly the myth) of the Protagoras. Through a close analysis of the core of the Great Speech, I confirm the ethical and collective reading of Protagoras' maxim that I have given in chapter 3. I end the chapter by providing some (modern) suggestions for taking Protagoras as a more serious epistemologist than he is actually thought of In the Conclusion, I sum up my whole reconstruction of the Platonic Protagoras and of his theory of knowledge, connecting it briefly with some features of fifth-century B.C Greek epistemology and, again, with some modern philosophical tenets.

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This paper suggests an unconventional solution to the “moral question” regarding Thucydides' History of the Peloponnesian War. The term “moral question” refers to the fact that a significant number of current leading commentators on Thucydides think that the historian must have some form of moral outlook, but experience difficulty when they attempt to decipher a moral perspective from the historian's text.To find a solution to the “moral question”, this paper looks back to a short passage written by Friedrich Nietzsche titled “What I Owe to the Ancients.” In this short and highly personal essay, Nietzsche suggests that the key to properly reading Thucydides is to interpret him in the context of the sophists, teachers of rhetoric and moral philosophers prominent in Thucydides' 4th century Athens. By comparing statements on the sophists that appear throughout Nietzsche's body of work to the surviving writings of the sophists and their contemporaries, a picture of “sophist culture” is established, in order to test the hypothesis that Thucydides can be profitably interpreted as expressing a sophistic understanding of morality. A “sophistic understanding of morality”, in the simplest terms, centers on the the relativity of morals, the idea that morality has no real, concrete, and universal existence, and that morality is thus a fragile and changeable human construct. By following Nietzsche's picture of Thucydides as the “highest expression of sophist culture” to its fullest extent, we are able to answer the “moral question” of Thucydides' History, and to perceive a work that is itself a bold and challenging statement on the nature of morality, while containing relatively little explicit commentary on questions of right and wrong.

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The field of rhetoric has recently begun to position the Sophists as an integral part of the history of the discipline. Sophistic influence has been acknowledged in other fields as well, particularly philosophy and literary theory; however, Sophistic influence on political theory has been virtually ignored. This thesis examines the epistemology of the Sophists within the context of the debates of ancient Greece, and illustrates the connections between Sophistic thought and the ideology behind the structuring of the American federal government. Specific connections are made between the epistemology of the Sophists and that expressed in The Federalist, as well as that of earlier political theorists Thomas Hobbes and John Locke.
Department of English

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This thesis argues that the most prominent account of Protagoras in contemporary rhetorical scholarship, Edward Schiappa's Protagoras and Logos, loses critical historiographical objectivity in Platonic overdetermination of surviving historical artifacts. In the first chapter, I examine scholarship from the past thirty years to set a baseline for historiographical thought and argue that John Muckelbauer's conception of productive reading offers the best solution to the intellectual and discursive impasse in which contemporary Protagorean rhetorical theory currently resides. The second chapter explains the pitfalls of Platonic overdetermination and the ways in which Plato himself was inextricably situated within an ideological blinder, from which fair treatment of competing philosophical ideology becomes impossible. Finally, I argue for a historical Protagoras free of Platonic overdetermination by looking to Mario Untersteiner's 1954 Sophists. Untersteiner looks to Plato not for an accurate historical account, but for insight into why the great philosopher found the sophists to be such great perturbations. Rediscovering Protagoras through a Sophistic paradigm, I hope to open space for new, productive discourse on the first Sophist.

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The Antioch oration of Libanius is, on the one hand, a typical product of the sophistic work of the orator, designed to glorify his native city, and on the other, one of the best examples of the panegyric of the city in late ancient oratory. A panegyric to the city is a popular genre of solemn eloquence, well studied and described in the ancient rhetorical literature. However, Libanius’ Antioch oration is particularly interesting as the result of the development of ancient oratory, accumulating the old rhetorical tradition and the best achievements of ancient Greek orators in this genre, dating back to Isocrates and to the first sophists. The discovery of the closest literary samples for the Antioch oration allows us to determine the degree and nature of the influence of the previous rhetoric literature (the so-called Second Sophistic) on the development of late ancient eloquence, often referred as the Third Sophistic, as well as assess the contribution of Libanius as a panegyrist to the history of ancient oratory. Refs 35.

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Knowledge is the engine of change in every society, and within this structure, training of philosophical perception is essential. This article analyses how modern philosophical education is compatible with the ideal of knowledge society – how teaching material changes when knowledge becomes a commodity. The article searches for parallels between the opposition among the sophists and Socrates and the modern day approach to fostering a culture of dialogue, focusing on knowledge and innovation society.

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On the example of I.A. Bunin's definition of the essence of poetry,the understanding of art as an anamnesis of generic and universal memory is considered. A true understanding of poetry requires a kind of “initiation” of the soul, and for the “profane” who seek external “beauty” in it, it remains incomprehensible. To understand this understanding of art, one can use the philosophical concepts of the anamnesis of the soul and the sophism of being.

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