-Nowadays, "sophist" has a negative connotation- it means someone who makes deceptively plausible arguments but are actually totally bogus, or are just arguing badly on purpose (basically just internet trolls).
-Interestingly enough, the term actually means "wise person". So WTF?
-Comes from Plato and Aristotle, perhaps sarcastically referring to people who do this shit.
-One of the most powerful sophists was Protagoras, due to his friendship with the great Athenian general Pericles.
-Many sophists were crafty non-Athenian Greeks who had traveled to Athens in hopes of making a career out of teaching rhetoric and also maybe working as a lawyer or negotiator.
-According to Plato, they were just merely teaching persuasive techniques at a steep price. However, in reality most sophists had a ton of people under their wing that influenced the culture, from artists to playwrights to philosophers, etc. Even mathematicians!
-Prodicus is one influential sophist of note, as he was skilled at debating semantics.
-Also an acquaintance of Plato and a teacher of Socrates!
-Stated that in order to be civil, we must DEBATE, not argue.
-One typical sophist argument would be that there is no absolute truth; we only have persuasion.
-This philosophical concept is usually associated with Protagoras.
-This is famously portrayed in the eponymous Plato dialogue.
-In "Protagoras", Protagoras states that political virtue is a gift from the gods to humanity- it's open to everyone to everyone, unlike a more specific skill, like, say, flute-playing. Because of this, we punish those who fall short of behaving according to the basic virtues.
-Because not everyone acts virtuous, Protagoras teaches people how to be more virtuous than perhaps they are naturally inclined to be.
-Protagoras is actually so confident in his teachings that he will accept any payment for his teachings so long as the customer pays what they feel was the worth of what Protagoras had taught them.
-A famous quote: "Man is the measure of all things. Of the things that are, that they are. Of the things that are not, that they are not."
-This is the root of the philosophical concept of "relativism".
-Plato included this Protagoras quote to communicate the belief that each man only judges what is true for himself, but no one is in a position to judge what is true for anyone else. Essentially, truth is only what is true for that person.
-For example, the wind may be cold for one person, but warm for another person. There is no such thing as what the wind actually is.
-So, one obvious question is: how can Protagoras teach virtue when truth is relative?
-In another dialogue, Protagoras answers this question: a person's virtue is only what is advantageous for that person, and that person alone. Protagoras only teaches virtue that is best for that person, but not necessarily best for everyone.
-In yet another dialogue, Socrates debates this idea, but this time it is proposed that virtue is what is advantageous not just for anyone, but for those who are naturally stronger.
-Another sophist named Persimicus argues for this idea in Plato's "Republic".
-Basically, if there is no absolute truth, then there is only advantage, and therefore the strongest should be the most rewarded.
-However, how can the sophists argue what SHOULD happen when morality is rejected altogether? The sophists shoot back by distinguishing between "custom" and "nature". "Customs" are social rules and laws of justice, but they are not necessarily reflective of the natural order. However, it is "natural" for the strong to dominate the weak.
-The sophists perhaps saw themselves perhaps as iconoclasts, exposing society to how man-made its norms are.
-It seems like Protagoras never went so far with his belief that he got into "Might Is Right" territory...it was just more like he worked to improve his clients advantages, regardless of whether the virtue behind it was "true" or not.
-Protagoras also seemed to enjoy "double arguments", arguing both sides.
-Sophists loved to boast that they could always "make the weaker argument stronger" because it didn't matter which one was right or not since truth didn't even exist in the first place!
-Gorgias, another famous sophist, argued that the rhetoric he taught was neutral and amoral...you could use it for "good" or for "evil", but whatever you chose, neither was his responsibility. Essentially, mastery over rhetoric was almost like magic.
-On a side note, Gorgias also wrote a parody of the Eleadic philosophy of Parmenides, "On Not Being". A+ trolling.
No comments:
Post a Comment