The Timpson Lyceum · History of Philosophy (2024)

The Sophists – Lecture 11 (History of Philosophy)

Overview

The Sophists mark a decisive turn in Greek thought: away from the Presocratics' cosmological question ("what is the one stuff?") and toward man, society, and knowledge itself. After Thales, Pythagoras, Heraclitus, Parmenides, and the atomists (Leucippus and Democritus) had wrestled over Being versus Becoming, a new professional class rose in fifth-century Athens at the height of its post-Persian-War wealth and radical democracy. In a direct democracy where every citizen argued his own case in the assembly and the law-courts, persuasion was political power — and the Sophists were the traveling, fee-charging teachers who sold that skill. Their reputation was mixed: prized by the wealthy who could afford them, resented by the common man as hired guns of the aristocracy — a stigma preserved in the modern word "sophistry" for subtly deceptive reasoning.

Philosophically the Sophists are Greece's first systematic skeptics: they deny that any objective and absolute knowledge is attainable. Their program rests on two empiricist premises — that all knowledge originates in sense perception, and that the senses are unavoidably fallible and private — from which they conclude that truth is at best subjective and relative. This lecture sets the historical scene (Athenian democracy and wealth), fixes four indispensable terms (objective/subjective, absolute/relative), lays out the general skeptical argument, and previews the movement's four representatives — beginning with Protagoras, the first to call himself a sophist, and continuing to Gorgias, Prodicus, and others. It is the gateway to the Socratic reaction that dominates the rest of the course.

Key Concepts

• Sophist (sophistēs) — Literally a "wise man," from sophia (wisdom); compare philosophia, "love of wisdom." Not a school with shared doctrines (unlike the Milesians) but a professional class of itinerant teachers of aretē (excellence/virtue) and, above all, rhetoric.
• The Athenian scene — Victory in the Greco-Persian Wars left Athens ascendant. Through the Delian League, allied cities paid tribute (money more than ships), pouring wealth into Athens; meanwhile democracy spread across liberated city-states, making persuasive speech the currency of power.
• Pure (direct) democracy — Unlike a modern representative republic, citizens personally proposed and voted on legislation and judged court cases. A defendant pleaded his own case before the assembly; guilt or acquittal turned on persuasion, not on the letter of the law.
• Rhetoric vs. dialectic — Rhetoric is the art of persuading an audience (winning the vote), indifferent to truth; dialectic is reasoned question-and-answer aimed at discovering truth. The Sophists taught the former — "not how to reason but how to persuade" — which is precisely the ground of Socrates' quarrel with them.
• Paid teaching — Small supply, huge demand → high fees. Only sons of wealthy (formerly aristocratic) families could afford instruction, reinforcing the perception that Sophists served the elite — "a corporate lawyer" in the popular Greek eye.
• Objective vs. subjective — Objective: existing independently of any perceiver (a physical object). Subjective: existing only for and dependent on a perceiver (a toothache, an emotion, a hallucination).
• Absolute vs. relative — Absolute: holding without reference to anything else (a fixed height). Relative: holding only in relation to something else (being "tall," position, velocity). Crucially, a property can be objective yet relative (position and velocity are measurable by all, yet frame-dependent) — so objective/absolute and subjective/relative do not line up neatly.
• Skepticism — The thesis that certain (objective and absolute) knowledge is impossible; all knowledge is subjective and relative. The Sophists are the first to advance this formally.
• The two-premise argument against knowledge — (1) All knowledge is rooted in sense perception; (2) all sense perception is flawed and private. What is perceived depends jointly on the object and on the perceiver's sensory apparatus (a color-blind man and another see different roses), and no majority vote can adjudicate whose apparatus is "right."
• No objective claims — Since each perceiver has only his own apparatus and cannot perceive through another's, no two people can be shown to perceive the same thing; hence nothing can be established as objective.
• No absolute claims — Since one's apparatus can change over time, the way reality appears now need not be how it appears later; hence nothing can be established as absolute.
• Antilogic / dissoi logoi — For every proposition equally convincing arguments can be built for and against. Sophists showcased this by inviting an audience to name a topic and a side, then arguing it — proof that persuasion, not truth, was the trade.
• Ethical relativism and nomos vs. physis — Being agnostic (not atheist), Sophists could ground ethics neither in religion nor in reason; virtue therefore rests not on an objective human nature (physis) but on arbitrary social convention (nomos). What produces pleasure now is "good" now; all desires are ethically equal, leading to the notorious slide toward "might makes right" — law being merely a mutual non-aggression pact struck by the weak.

Worked Example

Formalizing the self-refutation (peritropē, "table-turning") of radical relativism. The Sophists' banner claim is that all truth is merely relative to the perceiver. Applied to itself, this claim collapses. Let the relativist's thesis be

$R: \forall p\,\big(\text{true}(p) \rightarrow \text{true-for}(p, s)\big),$

read "for every proposition $p$, if $p$ is true, it is only true relative to some subject $s$" — there is no perceiver-independent, absolute truth.

1. Apply the thesis to itself. $R$ is itself a proposition, so substitute $p := R$. If $R$ is true, then by its own content $R$ is only true-for its proponent $s$: $\text{true}(R) \rightarrow \text{true-for}(R, s)$.
2. Draw out what "true-for-$s$-only" means. To be true merely relative to $s$ is to carry no binding force for any other subject $s'$. Formally, $\text{true-for}(R,s) \wedge \neg\,\text{true-for}(R,s')$ is consistent for some $s' \neq s$ — a dissenter can reject $R$ with equal legitimacy.
3. Confront the universal quantifier. But $R$ asserts something about every proposition and, implicitly, binds every perceiver ("no one possesses absolute truth"). That is an absolute, perceiver-independent claim: $\forall s'\,\text{true-for}(R,s')$.
4. Derive the contradiction. Steps 2 and 3 together give

$\big(\exists s'\ \neg\,\text{true-for}(R, s')\big) \wedge \big(\forall s'\ \text{true-for}(R, s')\big),$

which has the form $(\exists s'\,\neg Q(s')) \wedge (\forall s'\,Q(s'))$ — a flat contradiction, $\phi \wedge \neg\phi$. 5. Take the two horns. Either $R$ is absolutely true — in which case at least one truth (namely $R$) is not merely relative, so $R$ is false; or $R$ is only relatively true — in which case it does not bind the dissenter, who may consistently affirm that absolute truth exists. Either way $R$ fails: $\text{true}(R) \rightarrow \neg\,\text{true}(R)$, whence $\neg\,\text{true}(R)$. 6. Conclusion. Radical relativism is self-refuting: it cannot be stated as a truth without exempting itself from its own rule. The skeptic who says "there is no objective truth" is asked in return whether that is objectively true — and has no consistent answer. $\blacksquare$

Summary

• The Sophists shifted philosophy from cosmology to man and knowledge, thriving in wealthy, democratic fifth-century Athens where persuasion equaled power.
• They were paid, itinerant teachers of rhetoric (persuasion), not dialectic (truth-seeking) — hence both their prestige among the elite and the enduring pejorative "sophistry."
• Master the four terms: objective/subjective (independent vs. perceiver-dependent) and absolute/relative (context-free vs. context-bound); a property can be objective yet relative.
• As Greece's first skeptics, they argued from two empiricist premises — all knowledge comes through the senses, and the senses are fallible and private — that no objective, absolute knowledge is possible, and that any thesis can be argued both ways (dissoi logoi).
• Their ethics is relativist (nomos over physis): with neither religion nor reason as a ground, "good" reduces to present pleasure, all desires rank equal, and the door opens to "might makes right" — a position whose radical form is self-undermining.