Should Plato Have Lumped All Sophists

Plato said Socrates was charges with arguing the weaker claim over the stronger claim. The actual quote from the essay is “He makes the weaker argument defeat the stronger and he teachers these doctrines to

If Meno is something of a dummy for aristocratic Sophist sympathizers, Anytus is even more clearly a stand-in for the somber, unconsidered values of the Athenian political elite. An actual historical politician of the time, he's grumpy, largely closed to new ideas, and insistent on inherited, class-based customs as the vehicle for virtue--he suggests that any "gentleman" on the streets of Athens is a fine example of virtue. Anytus, an Athenian conservative, despises the Sophists. Like other prominent Athenians at the time, he is probably suspicious of the Sophists' cleverness with words and their tendency to lead young followers away from success in worldly matters. Socrates encounters this idea that philosophy is a corrupting influence in many of his dialogues, and that perception will eventually lead to his trial and execution for "corrupting the youth." Thus, Plato is all the more determined to highlight Socrates' profound differences from the Sophists.

In this essay I would like to talk about the nature of sophism and how it changes religion, politics and education. In the first part of my essay I am going to define the meaning of sophism, in the second part I am going to talk about the connection of sophism and aristocrats, in the third part of my essay I am going to talk about the changes in religion with the help of sophism; in the fourth part I will examine the changes in decision-making and in last part I will talk about Socrates use of cross-examination to find out the meaning of the oracle’s message. As a source of information I am going to use Plutarch’s essays Pericles and Alcibiades, Plato’s Apology and Crito, and Thucydides’ Peloponnesian War.

I am now going to define some terms that pertain to the argument between Thrasymachus and Socrates. The Sophists were a presocratic group that earned a living by teaching young Greek men lessons in excellence and to speak intelligently and persuasively. Sophists, like Thrasymachus, believed in subjective truth. Subjective truths are truths that in some way depend on us. How we think or feel on a matter is a

The city of Athens feared and generally mistrusted philosophy. Socrates’ arrest makes this clear. The leaders of the city did not want Socrates out in the streets and teaching people to think like him, so he was arrested. Where did this distrust of philosophy come from? The city of Athens was progressive, the center of Greek civilization. However, they were no friends to philosophers like Socrates. Perhaps this distrust was built on the foundation that the sophists laid. Though the accusers testified against Socrates, not the sophists, perhaps Socrates had the sophists to blame. The sophists were clever speakers, and Socrates clearly distinguished himself from them, admitting that though he may be eloquent, it is in a different way than the

In Plato’s Sophist, the character of the Stranger appears and enters discussion with Theaetetus to discover what, exactly, a sophist is. In the final section of the dialogue in the final diairesis, the Stranger and Theaetetus agree that a sophist can be described as under the productive art, of the human kind, an image maker, in the fantastic class, using one’s own person, of the art of dissembling opinion, and one who speaks in private conversation. After this conclusion, it becomes clear that the Stranger himself is representative of this final definition of what a sophist is, and can be proven to be so by finding moments where he epitomizes these various characteristics.

     Socrates was wise in respect to the fact that he never accepted a “truth” that was told to him, without getting incontestable evidence to back it up. He made the realization that people believed in things without even knowing where their ideas came from. In ancient Athens, citizens believed in many gods and myths associated with them.

But on the contrary Plato also describes Socrates in a very critical way and also portrayed as a very disputable way but he also Characterize him as a philosopher who give lot of contributions in the western philosophy.Plato consider his as a sophist because he was father of western philosophy and propounded many theories and also gives many doctrines which also known as Doctrine of Socrates but as same as Aristophanes he describes him as an ironic person who does not believe in God.

He argues that philosophy seems to yield very little definite evidence of any of the conceived concepts being true. However, he continues by saying that while it may not be practical for the society as a whole, it still benefits the individuals. Philosophy, to him, allows students to break free of societal norms that they have been taught their whole lives. It gives students the chance to think creatively in their intellectual goals as well as dispute the assumptions and believes that have previously gone unchallenged. While this believe differs from Socrates, the two are not incompatible. Philosophy does not just have to benefit society or an individual, rather it can benefit both, neither, or just one. It is for that reason that I can see why both philosophers are right in their own

This is an effective text to begin with, as Socrates clearly makes a separation between himself and the sophists, such as Gorgias, Hippias, and Prodicus.1 (Apology, 19e) The latter two, one should note, appear in Plato's dialogue Protagoras, a dialogue in which Socrates debates sophists on whether or not virtue can be taught. This dialogue is, alongside Gorgias, one of the main works featuring debates between Socrates and sophist interlocutors. In Protagoras, Socrates is found debating the great sophist Protagoras, after which the dialogue is named, over courage, knowledge, and virtue. Socrates ultimately argues that courage, like the rest of virtue, is nothing but wisdom. However, to return to the distinction between sophist and philosopher, in Apology, one can find more nuanced references to the aforementioned distinction. Consider for example: “Of the many lies they told [about me], one in particular surprised me, namely that you should be careful not to be deceived by an accomplished speaker like me.”2 Or

"Plato's mission was therefore to transmit his legacy in a way that captured the liveliness and charm of the Socratic method but within a more structured framework" (Cole 117). He was able to do this in two ways which were by finding an informal school called the Academy and by later writing a series of dialogues wrapped weighty around philosophical content. The first treatise on political philosophy written in the West was the Politeia. "In it,Plato argues---through the character of Socrates--- that social harmony and order are more important than individual liberty or equality" (Cole 118). He imagines an ideal polis where most people are governed by a superior group of "guardians" chosen in their youth for their attributes of intelligence and

Just as the opposite of up is down, the opposite of right is wrong, and the opposite of good is evil, the opposite of the Sophists was Plato. Plato and his philosophies were also rooted in ancient Greece at the same time as the Sophists. Plato studied under Socrates, another famous ancient philosopher, and started the very first center for learning which he called the Academy. Plato was not what you would call a relativist though. He was exactly the opposite. He was opposed to all the beliefs of the Sophists, believing them to be only concerned with the manipulative aspects of how humans attain knowledge. He argued that they taught people how to persuade people into believing they heard the truth, even if it wasn’t in fact the truth. Plato believes that true rhetoric is where philosophers and their pupils become free from all worldly encumbrances and all conventional beliefs in the pursuit of a transcendent absolute truth. (Bizzell P. & Herzberg, B., 2001, pg. 29) Plato believes that there is in fact absolute truth and contends that discourse is necessary to uncover it. He feels that false rhetoric is Sophist rhetoric and that with their vast knowledge of rhetoric, they should be using it to find absolute truth, not teaching people how to convince people that

Like mathematics, he believed morality was obtained through knowledge, not rhetoric. Socrates was interested in communication and argument just as the Sophists were but he used his arguments to get closer to an absolute truth rather than trying to win. Unlike the Sophists, Socrates refused to call himself a teacher or accept any money for anything he taught. He would argue his point by saying that he isn’t cut out to be a teacher because he claims to not know anything. How could someone teach if they are unsure of what they believed?

In ancient Greece, being a philosopher carried various implications, several of which were unfavorable. In a time when natural philosophers were accused for being non-believers in the traditional deities and sophists were defamed for selling their intellectual services for money, Socrates fit in neither category. Nonetheless, the moment Socrates decided to become an enquirer, or a philosopher of human nature, he was chastised. His enemies, men he had either insulted or embarrassed, sought vengeance and in their process to do so, tried to define him. Accused of being an atheist and a corruptor of the youth, Socrates was viewed harshly by the society he lived in, but, despite this, his true nature revealed itself through his words and Plato’s dialogues. His prosecutors aimed to vilify his name and profession, and ultimately sentence him to death, a goal they eventually completed, but the accusations were not definitive of who he was. Socrates was a philosopher, first and foremost, attempting to find the reasons for various phenomenon, but he was also a self-professed prophet, indirectly given a prophecy from the gods, determined to use dialectic to bring about self-awareness in his fellow citizens. His ideologies, thus, became the building blocks for the philosophers of the generations succeeding him.

Throughout the history of the world, philosophy has been at the forefront of the human search for knowledge, but there is no other philosophy like ancient Greek philosophy. Ancient Greek philosophy roughly began in the sixth century BCE and continued on up until ancient Greece became apart of the Roman Empire. The great Greek philosophers of the time, like Plato, Socrates, and Aristotle focused their study of philosophy in subjects like political philosophy, ethics, metaphysics, ontology, logic, biology, and rhetoric to name a few. Even today many philosophers agree that ancient Greek philosophy has influenced much of today’s Western culture. Among the broad subject of ancient Greek philosophy there were many sub-forms of Greek philosophy like the Pre-Socratic philosophy, which involves the Milesian school, and Pythagoreanism, and classical Greek philosophy, which involves Socrates’, Plato’s, and Aristotle’s teachings; and then there was sophism and the sophists. Who are the sophists and why/how are their teachings relevant with the rest of ancient Greek philosophy?