"utilitarian English classicist George Grote (1904),wrote that the sophists were progressive thinkers who placed in question the prevailing morality of their time. More recent work by French theorists such as Jacques Derrida (1981) and Jean Francois-Lyotard (1985) suggests affinities between the sophists and postmodernism."
Sophist
http://www.iep.utm.edu/sophists/#SH2f
http://www.philosophybasics.com/movements_sophism.html
https://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/hegel/works/hp/hpsophists.htm
Sophist and Rhetoric
Philosophy vs. Sophistry
- In Ancient Greece politics were very important especially the skill of persuasive speech or rhetoric
- Rhetoric was especially useful as self-defence in the event that one was subject to a lawsuit.
- The sophists understood the need for this service so they provide rhetoric teaching even if most sophists professed to teach a broader range of subjects.
Philosophy vs. Sophistry
The Sophists
Protagoras
Prodicus and Thrasymachus
Antiphon
Hippias
Gorgias
Major Themes of Sophist Thought
- Nature and Convention
- Relativism
- Language and Reality
Philosophers on the Sophist
Hegel: "Greece has to thank the Sophists for this culture, because they taught men to exercise thought as to what should have authority for them, and thus their culture was culture in philosophy as much as in eloquence."
http://www.iep.utm.edu/sophists/#H3
What is a Sophist?
Who were the Sophist
The term "sophism" comes from the Greek "sophos" or "sophia" (meaning "wise" or "wisdom"), and originally referred to any expertise in a specific domain of knowledge or craft. After a period where it mainly referred to poets, the word came to describe general wisdom and, especially, wisdom about human affairs. Over time, it came to denote a class of itinerant intellectuals who taught courses in "excellence" or "virtue", (aretē)
Plato and Aristotle define The legacy of the Sophist
- Known as professional teachers who would teach the wealthy academia such as the nature of language and culture, and who used rhetoric to achieve their purposes (which was generally to persuade or convince others) Usually for a high fee.
- Plato and Aristotle have been the authority on the history of the Sophist
- They have defined the sophist as using "fallacious reasoning, intellectually making elaborate, fraudulent claims and being morally without principle"
- "Plato and Aristotle established their view of what constitutes legitimate philosophy in part by distinguishing their own activity – and that of Socrates – from the sophists"
- But were they correct?