SOPHISTS

Originally, Sophists were traveling teachers during the fifth century B.C. in Greece who provided education through lectures and in return received fees from their audiences. The sophistic movement arose at a time when there was much questioning of the absolute nature of familiar values and ways of life. An antithesis arose between nature and custom, tradition, or law, in which custom could be regarded either as artificial restraints on the freedom of the natural state or as beneficial and civilizing restraints on natural anarchy. Both views were represented among the sophists, though the former was the more common. Their first and most eminent representative was Protagoras; other notable sophists include Gorgias and Antiphon.


• Protagoras held that though the social virtues are not themselves innate, the capacity to acquire them is, and we all need to develop such virtues if we are to flourish both individually and as a species.

• Antiphon argued that by nature we all pursue our own advantage and that most man-made laws are unfavorable to this pursuit and should be evaded if we can escape detection.

• Some sophists took Antiphon’s view further and claimed that the dictates of nature represented a ‘natural justice’ which endorsed the supremacy of the strong over the weak. (An example of this kind of philosophy is the belief that “might makes right.”)

• Others opted for a social contract theory by means of which individuals agree to forgo the ultimate good of committing conventional injustice in order to avoid the ultimate evil of suffering it.

• The more notorious of them boasted of their ability to "make the worst appear the better reason."

• Modern studies have stressed the contributions of Protagoras and Gorgias to a theory of knowledge and to ethics. They are frequently cited today as forerunners of pragmatism.

[Modern pragmatists usually tried to dispense with an account of truth and concentrate upon the nature of belief and its relations with human attitude, emotion, and need. The driving motivation of pragmatism is the idea that belief on the one hand must have a close connection with success on the other. One way of cementing the connection is found in the idea that natural selection must have adapted us to be cognitive creatures because beliefs have effects: they work. ]

Generally, ‘nature’ connotes what comes as an inborn characteristic, while ‘convention’ connotes that which is suggested by custom and practice. The opposition between these two terms was an important feature of ancient Greek political thought. Until challenged by the sophists, political thinkers seem to have thought of moral ideas as being natural in the sense that a morally mature person would come to acquire them. The sophist challenge lay in the idea that perhaps moral ideas were human inventions, which were proposed ultimately because they were convenient. It was also theorized that people who have both meted out and received injustice began to set down their own laws and to determine what is lawful and just. Justice, then, is a mean between what is best—doing injustice without paying the penalty—and what is worst—suffering injustice without being able to avenge oneself. Plato's characters in his dialogue called the Republic makes these assertions, while Socrates devotes the rest of the Republic to arguments designed to rebut this and to show that ideas of justice are indeed natural.

The Greek distinction between the natural and conventional has persisted. For instance, those writers who follow the organic analogy are siding with Plato and Aristotle in thinking of the political institutions or ideas they praise as ‘natural’. Those who deny the organic analogy and regard institutions and ideas as human artifacts side with the sophists.

Protagoras (c. 490-420 BC) was the most successful of the Sophists. He is famous for the relativistic statement that “man is the measure of all things.” Relativism is a theory that conceptions of truth and moral values are not absolute but are relative to the persons or groups holding them.

The precise meaning of Protagoras’ relativistic assertion that “man is the measure of all things” is debatable. One interpretation leads to subjective idealism, the theory that nature has no objective existence independent of the minds that perceive it. In this way, it means that whatever seems true for a person is true for that person.

Relativism is similar to perspectivism, the view that all truth is truth from or within a particular perspective; the perspective may be a general human point of view, set by such things as the nature of our sensory apparatus, or it may be thought to be bound by culture, history, language, class, or gender. Since there may be many perspectives, there are also different families of truths. In other words, something that is true for one person (or group of people) can very well be false for another.