Sophistic Movement
450 BCE – 380 BCE c.
Teachers who took fees to make men effective in public life, and who argued that law and morality are human conventions rather than facts of nature.
- Active
- 450 BCE – 380 BCE
- Where
- Athens, and the cities the sophists travelled between
- Status
- extinct
- Tradition
- Greek
The claim
Man is the measure of all things. What counts as just, lawful or true varies with the community that holds it, and skill in argument is therefore the decisive civic art.
What it held
The sophists were not a school. They were a profession: itinerant teachers who arrived in a city, took paying students, and taught them to argue. What makes them philosophically interesting is the doctrine several of them used to justify the trade.
Protagoras' claim that man is the measure of all things is the first clear relativism in the record, and he applied it to law: a city's customs are right for that city, and there is no standpoint outside from which to correct it. Others pressed the distinction between nomos, convention, and physis, nature — and some drew the conclusion that since laws are merely agreed, the strong have no reason to keep them. That argument, put in Thrasymachus' mouth in the Republic, is the one Plato spends a book answering.
Gorgias went further into strangeness, arguing in three stages that nothing exists, that if it did we could not know it, and that if we knew it we could not communicate it. Whether that is scepticism or a rhetorical exhibition is still argued.
How it argued
Antilogic: arguing both sides of a case with equal force, on the view that there are two opposed accounts of everything. Taught by demonstration and imitation rather than doctrine.
What it was arguing against
The assumption that traditional Athenian morality rested on anything more than agreement, and the aristocratic idea that excellence is inherited rather than taught.
Where it disagreed with itself
Whether they held a common position at all. Protagoras' relativism, Gorgias' nihilism and Prodicus' interest in the precise use of words have little in common beyond the fee.
Common misconceptions
That sophist means a cheat. The word was neutral before Plato, whose hostility is so effective that it has been an insult in every European language since. And they were not uniformly amoral: Protagoras' myth in Plato's dialogue is a serious defence of civic virtue as teachable.
How it began
Athenian democracy made public speaking the route to influence, and men who could teach it could charge for it. Protagoras is said to have earned more than Phidias.
What became of it
The name became an accusation and the profession went on regardless, absorbed into the teaching of rhetoric, which remained the standard higher education in Europe for two thousand years.
Lasting influence
Plato's ethics and politics are largely constructed against them. Their relativism returns in the Renaissance, in Nietzsche, and in every twentieth-century argument that truth is socially constituted.
Why it still matters
The question they forced — whether justice is anything more than what a community has agreed — is unresolved and now central to moral philosophy under other names.
Put another way
A trainer who will coach either boxer and holds no view on which should win.
Where to start
The Encomium of Helen. It is short, brilliant, and does the thing rather than describing it.
The surprising bit
Protagoras also wrote that concerning the gods he could not know whether they exist or not, the question being obscure and life short. It is the first agnosticism on record and reportedly got his books burnt.
In their own words
Man is the measure of all things: of things that are, that they are; of things that are not, that they are not.
Speech is a powerful lord, which by means of the finest and most invisible body effects the divinest works.
Connections
- Opposed by
- Old Academy
The verdict
A profession rather than a doctrine, remembered through the writings of its most brilliant enemy.