Sophists

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Professional itinerant teachers and philosophers, who flourished in Greece from c.450-400 bc. A fair appraisal of their work is difficult: our main source is Plato, who is generally biased against them. They did not form a school, but differed widely in their interests and philosophical positions. Their main market, however, consisted of wealthy young men who desired political influence; consequently almost all were concerned to teach the rhetorical skills politics required. Such skills were particularly in demand in democratic Athens, and this became their unofficial centre.

Their subject-matter included metaphysics, epistemology, and linguistics, but the main focus was the relation between individual and society. Central to this relation was, they believed, the relation between ‘nature’ and ‘convention’. 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. In contrast, Antiphon argued that by nature we all pursue our own advantage, and that most man-made laws are inimical to this pursuit and should be evaded if we can escape detection. Some sophists took this view further and claimed that the dictates of nature represented a ‘natural justice’ which endorsed the supremacy of the strong over the weak. 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.

— Angela Hobbs

Although the term originally applied to generally wise men, it was applied by Plato to various teachers of whom he disapproved, including Protagoras, Gorgias, Thrasymachus, and Hippias of Elis. Plato generally treats them as charlatans who talked purely for victory and took money for teaching the technique. In fact their general stance seems to have been not unlike that of Socrates, with a reasonably sceptical attitude to speculative cosmologies, such as those of the Eleatics, and a reasonable insistence on going to the foundations of morality and epistemology. It seems likely that Plato's attitude betrayed an aristocratic disdain for the democratic tendencies implicit in teaching and spreading rhetorical power to a wider class of citizens, and fear of a democratic government in which the people are swayed by nothing but rhetoric, or spin.