How the Sophists Forced Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle to Rethink Truth
Protagoras’ dictum: Anthrōpos metron pantōn—’Man is the measure of all things.’
By Dr Neel Burton — Psychiatrist, philosopher, and wine writer; Fellow of Green Templeton College, University of Oxford; author of over twenty books.
For centuries, Greek philosophy had looked outwards. The first philosophers sought to understand the nature of the universe, inquiring into the substance, origin, and hidden principles of all things. Thales is remembered for upholding water as the fundamental substance, Heraclitus for his principle of perpetual change, Parmenides for his diametrically opposed principle of unchanging being, and Democritus for his atoms.
But by the middle of the fifth century BCE, philosophy faced an altogether different challenge. The question was no longer what the universe is made of, but whether we can know anything with certainty. Philosophy’s first great crisis arose not in a school or temple, but in the bustling streets and public squares of democratic Athens.
The Need for Sophists
By naturalising the world, the pre-Socratics had been responding and contributing to a waning of the old myths. As the world became demythologised, attention shifted from the gods to man, from the temples to the law courts, from questions about the cosmos to questions about logic, language, politics, morality, and society.
This intellectual revolution was matched by a political one. By the middle of the fifth century BCE, Athens had emerged triumphant from the Persian Wars. Enriched by empire and transformed into a radical democracy, it became a city in which political influence depended less upon noble birth than on the ability to persuade an assembly, sway a jury, or carry a crowd. In this new world, rhetoric became power.
The Sophists travelled from city to city offering public lectures and private instruction, especially to ambitious young aristocrats hoping for careers in public life. They taught rhetoric, argument, memory, and the art of persuasion. They were also handsomely rewarded. Some charged fees so enormous that Plato and Aristophanes never tired of mocking them.
Although itinerant, the Sophists naturally converged upon Athens, where they often resided at the houses of wealthy patrons such as the magnate Callias or the politician Callicles. According to Plato, Callias owned ‘the greatest and most glorious house’ in Athens and ‘spent a world of money on the sophists’. In Plato’s Greater Hippias, the Sophist Hippias tells Socrates, ‘If you were to know how much money I have made, you would be amazed…’
What the Sophists Taught
The Sophists were not a school in the usual sense. They had no common doctrine or shared founder, and often disagreed with one another. Some, such as Protagoras and Prodicus, were serious thinkers who won the respect even of Plato. Others became famous as intellectual entertainers, dazzling audiences with verbal tricks and paradoxes. Yet all shared a new concern with language, argument, rhetoric, politics, and practical life.
This marked a profound shift from the pre-Socratics. Rather than asking, ‘What is the universe made of?’, the Sophists asked, ‘How do we persuade others?’, ‘What is justice?’, and even, ‘Can there be any objective truth at all?’
No Sophist embodied this new outlook more fully than Protagoras. His most famous dictum, Anthrōpos metron pantōn—’Man is the measure of all things’—came to epitomise the movement. In the Theaetetus, Plato argues that if each and every man truly were the measure of all things, then nothing could be inherently true or false, or right or wrong—not even the dictum itself.
Protagoras is also remembered for the remarkable opening line of his lost work, About the Gods: ‘About the gods, I cannot be sure whether they exist or not, or what they are like to see; for many things stand in the way of the knowledge of them, both the opacity of the subject and the shortness of human life.’ Such agnosticism was startling in a deeply religious society, and only reinforced the suspicion that the Sophists were undermining traditional beliefs.
Gorgias, who lived for 108 years, pushed scepticism further still. Whether or not he believed his own arguments, he delighted in demonstrating the astonishing power of rhetoric. He boasted that he could speak on any subject at a moment’s notice and likened the effects of speech upon the soul to those of drugs upon the body. Words, like drugs, could heal, intoxicate, or poison.
Other Sophists explored different aspects of the same revolution. Prodicus became famous for distinguishing between near synonyms with pedantic precision, and for suggesting, not unlike Wittgenstein twenty-four centuries later, that philosophical progress begins with linguistic clarity. Antiphon contrasted nature (physis) with convention (nomos), raising the unsettling possibility that many of the laws and moral codes by which we live are no more than a matter of convention. The dichotomy surfaces in the Antigone of Sophocles (c. 441 BCE), when Antigone seeks to justify her attempt to bury her brother Polynices by claiming the superiority of divine over man-made law. Hippias claimed to be an authority on everything and wrote many books. He held that the purpose of life is autarkeia (self-sufficiency), and boasted of presenting himself at Olympia wearing nothing that he had not himself made, down to his girdle, sandals, seal-ring, strigil, and oil-flask.
The Sophists transformed Greek education, but they also raised an unsettling question: if every position can be defended by a sufficiently skilful speaker, what becomes of truth?
Why Socrates Objected
Socrates accepted many of the Sophists’ starting points. Like them, he turned away from cosmology to focus on ethics, politics, and the human condition. Like them, he engaged his fellow citizens in conversation. Yet there was one crucial difference.
The Sophists taught their pupils how to argue. Socrates sought to discover what was true—and never charged for it.
For Socrates, words were not instruments of persuasion but tools of inquiry. His famous method of questioning—the elenchus—served not to win debates but to expose contradictions, undermine false confidence, and inch towards genuine knowledge. He believed that careful questioning could reveal objective truths about justice, courage, friendship, and the good life.
Whereas the Sophists taught the art of persuasion, Socrates insisted that persuasion and truth were not the same thing.
This was the question at the heart of philosophy’s first great crisis: is philosophy a search for truth, or merely the art of persuasion?
Why Was Socrates Mistaken for a Sophist?
Ironically, many Athenians mistook Socrates for one of the Sophists. Like them, he challenged traditional beliefs and exposed the ignorance of prominent citizens through relentless questioning. In Aristophanes’ Clouds, he is portrayed as the head of a ‘Thinking Shop’, where students learn ingenious arguments and how to make the weaker case appear the stronger.
The caricature was unfair, but revealing. Socrates charged no fees, claimed no expertise, and repeatedly insisted that he knew nothing. Yet to many Athenians these distinctions seemed trivial. They saw only another unsettling intellectual who questioned convention and undermined established authority.
If Socrates was put on trial and, ultimately, to death, this was in part because many Athenians mistook him for a Sophist.
Plato’s Response
If Socrates sought truth through dialogue, Plato sought to explain why truth is possible in the first place.
The Sophists had shown how easily opinions differ. Plato agreed. But he refused to conclude that all opinions are therefore equally valid.
Instead, he argued that behind the changing world perceived by the senses lies a higher reality of eternal Forms: perfect Justice, Beauty, Equality, and Goodness. Our arguments may be confused and our perceptions unreliable, but these realities remain unchanged. Philosophy is therefore not merely the art of persuasion, but the search for objective truth.
Many of Plato’s greatest dialogues are shaped by this confrontation. In the Protagoras, Gorgias, Hippias Major, Hippias Minor, and other dialogues, the Sophists become Plato’s principal interlocutors. Sometimes they are treated with respect, sometimes with devastating irony, but always they represent the challenge that philosophy must overcome.
Whether Plato portrayed them fairly remains an open question. Much of what we know about the Sophists comes through his writings, and he had every reason to emphasise their weaknesses while strengthening his own case. It was, perhaps, one of history’s most resounding philosophical victories—so complete that the word ‘sophist’ still carries negative connotations.
Aristotle’s Response
Aristotle inherited the same problem but answered it differently. Whereas Plato had looked beyond the visible world, Aristotle looked more closely at it.
Instead of grounding knowledge in transcendent Forms, he sought reliable methods for investigating the world itself. His answer to the Sophists lay not in another metaphysical theory, but in the careful disciplines of logic, observation, and demonstration.
Aristotle analysed arguments with a new precision, distinguishing valid reasoning from fallacy and demonstration from mere persuasion.
The Sophists had shown how arguments can mislead. Aristotle sought to show how, properly constructed, they can also lead us to truth.
Rehabilitating the Sophists
After Plato, the Sophists became the villains of Greek philosophy: eloquent teachers more interested in winning arguments and enriching themselves than discovering the truth.
Yet this judgement is probably too harsh. The Sophists helped lay the foundations of higher education. They recognised the importance of language, communication, critical thinking, and cultural difference. They questioned inherited assumptions and forced philosophy to justify itself rather than merely assert its conclusions.
Many of their questions remain alive today. Are moral values objective or culturally relative? Does language shape thought? Is law grounded in nature or merely in convention? Can rhetoric obscure truth as easily as reveal it? To these questions there are still no universally accepted answers.
The Sophists did not destroy philosophy. They transformed it—albeit, sometimes, despite themselves. By questioning truth, morality, justice, and knowledge itself, they created the first great crisis in Western philosophy. Socrates responded by seeking definitions, Plato by defending objective reality, and Aristotle by developing the tools of logic. Much of subsequent philosophy can be understood as an attempt to answer questions that the Sophists were among the first to ask.
They may have lost the argument in the eyes of Plato. But they changed philosophy forever.
By Dr Neel Burton — Psychiatrist, philosopher, and wine writer; Fellow of Green Templeton College, University of Oxford; author of over twenty books.
The ancient Greek sophist Gorgias compared the power of words to the power of drugs. More than two thousand years later, his insight is as compelling as ever. Words can persuade and deceive, comfort and inspire, alter the course of a life—or even the march of history.
Gorgias (483—375 BCE) hailed from Leontini in Sicily. He studied the art of persuasion—or rhetoric—under Corax and Tisias in nearby Syracuse and was also acquainted with the pre-Socratic philosopher Empedocles. In 427, he led an embassy to Athens to forge a defensive alliance against an overbearing Syracuse.
If Athens gave birth to philosophy, Sicily gave birth to rhetoric. Gorgias inherited the techniques of Corax and Tisias, the nominal founders of rhetoric, but transformed them into something that could dazzle audiences.
Indeed, Gorgias was something of a showman. He delighted in making unconventional, counterintuitive, or absurd arguments appear the stronger, and spoke in a florid, rhyming style that hypnotised all those who heard him. When in the theatre at Athens, he would say, “Come, propose me a theme!” He took great pride in his ability to defend any position, on any subject, and founded the art of extempore (‘off the cuff’) oratory.
In the Rhetoric, Aristotle characterises Gorgias’ style of oratory as ‘ironic’—and Gorgias’ opinions, if he had any at all, are hard to decipher. Rather than any positive philosophy, he offered an agnostic art of persuasion which he held to be of the utmost value.
In Plato’s Philebus, the sophist Protarchus tells Socrates: “I have often heard Gorgias maintain, Socrates, that the art of persuasion far surpassed every other; this, as he says, is by far the best of them all, for to it all things submit, not by compulsion, but of their own free will.”
Of Gorgias’ works, two short display speeches survive, the Encomium of Helenand the Defence of Palamedes, along with a fragment of a funeral oration and two paraphrases of a lost treatise, On Non-Being.
Words as Magic
In the Encomium of Helen, Gorgias sets himself the unlikely task of praising Helen and exculpating her for leaving Sparta with Paris and sparking the Trojan War. Gorgias argues that Helen could have been persuaded to leave in one of four ways: by the gods; by physical force; by the power of love; by the power of speech. But whichever way it was, she herself would have been blameless.
In defending Helen, Gorgias compares the effect of speech on the soul to the effect of drugs on the body: ‘Just as different drugs draw forth different humours from the body—some putting a stop to disease, others to life—so too with words: some cause pain, others joy, some strike fear, some stir the audience to boldness, some benumb and bewitch the soul with evil persuasion.’
A doctor’s diagnosis, a judge’s verdict, a declaration of love, a political speech, a prayer, or a promise may consist of nothing more than words, yet each can change the course of a life—even the course of nations and the march of history.
Perhaps this is why so many ancient cultures regarded words as sacred. In the Vedas, speech is revered as a divine power, and even personified as the goddess Vac. A similar idea can be found in the Bible, at John 1:1: ‘In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.’ In Genesis, God does not create the world with his hands, but by speech: ‘And God said, “Let there be light,” and there was light.’
As a psychiatrist, I am often reminded of Gorgias’ insight. Faced with a suicidal patient, everything may depend upon finding the right words at the right moment. A single sentence, if it is the right one, can alter a person’s entire outlook. Equally, a single sentence can break—or make—a career or a relationship.
The linguist may insist that ‘casting spells’ and ‘spelling words’ have different etymologies; the psychologist suspects that they spring from the same ancient intuition. If they had told us at school that we were learning magic, we would have paid a lot more attention.
Nothing Exists
In On Non-Being, Gorgias pushes his fascination with language to its absolute limit. Responding to the pre-Socratic philosopher Parmenides, who held that reality is one and accessible to reason, he parodies his arguments by turning each of them on its head: (1) nothing exists; (2) even if something did exist, nothing could be known about it; (3) even if something could be known, this knowledge could not be communicated to others; and (4) even if it could be communicated, it could not be understood. But as ever with Gorgias, it is far from clear whether these stood among his genuine opinions.
Gorgias spent much of his long life in Thessaly where he enjoyed the patronage of Aristippus of Larissa and Jason of Pherae. He taught Aristippus’ one-time beloved, the Meno who lent his name to Plato’s Meno, as well as the orator Isocrates, who came to rank among the Ten Attic Orators.
In his autobiographical Antidosis, Isocrates tells us that Gorgias:
…spent his time in Thessaly when the Thessalians were the most prosperous people in Hellas; he lived a long life and devoted himself to the making of money; he had no fixed domicile in any city and therefore paid out nothing for public weal nor was he subject to any tax; moreover, he did not marry and beget children, but was free from this, the most unremitting and expensive of burdens…
Having no wife or children, Gorgias died at the grand old age of 108.
Plato’s attacks ensured that the Sophists would long be remembered as clever tricksters rather than serious thinkers. Yet Gorgias deserves a more generous hearing. More than two thousand years ago, he recognised something we are still apt to forget: words do not merely describe the world. They shape how we experience it.
Every day we persuade, comfort, deceive, negotiate, inspire, forgive, and fall in love with nothing more substantial than sounds carried through the air. That is the nearest thing to magic that human beings have ever possessed.
In the early twentieth century, digs on Crete, led by Sir Arthur Evans, uncovered the remains of a complex civilization whose people Evans called the Minoans after the mythical King Minos. The Minoans flourished from around 3000 to 1500 BCE, and their society came to revolve around a series of palace complexes, the largest of which was at Knossos in the north of the island.
The Minoans grew rich from trade and acquired a hold on some of their neighbours, including perhaps on the city of Athens. According to myth, King Minos exacted out of Athens a nine-yearly tribute of seven boys and seven girls, to be thrown to the illegitimate son of Minos’ queen Pasiphae, the half-man, half-bull Minotaur, imprisoned in the labyrinth beneath the royal palace at Knossos.
But when the time came for the third tribute, Theseus, the founder-hero of Athens, took the place of one of the sacrificial boys in a daring bid to end this barbaric practice. Theseus killed the Minotaur with some help from Minos’ daughter Ariadne, who had given him a ball of red thread by which to retrace his steps out of the labyrinth. Theseus escaped with Ariadne but later abandoned her on the island of Naxos, to be wedded by the god Dionysus.
The myth of the Minotaur served in part to account for the shift in power from Minoan Crete to Mycenaean Greece, and, later, to Athens, and it is significant that Theseus also unified Attica under Athens, laying the foundation for the later Athenian Empire. The Mycenaeans flourished from around 1750 to 1050 BCE, with important centres, each built around a fortified palace, at Mycenae, Pylos, Thebes, and Athens, among others. They were dominated by a warrior aristocracy, and advanced by conquest rather than by trade as the Minoans had done. Their greatest achievement, sung by Homer, was the conquest of Troy in around 1250 BCE.
Towards the close of the Bronze Age, the Mycenaeans may have come under increasing pressure from the Dorians to the north. Whatever its cause, it took some three hundred years for Greece to recover from the demise of the Mycenaeans. During these Dark Ages, old trade links dissolved, the arts and crafts regressed, and famine set in. Many Greeks took to the seas in search of arable land, beginning a culture of colonization.
Looking to the upside, the disintegration of the rigid hereditary hierarchy of the Mycenaeans prepared the ground for a more open society, leading, in due course, to Athenian democracy. In particular, the loss of the Mycenaean king, or wanax, led to a loosening of the bond between myth and ritual so that myth became more detached and disinterested, paving the way for literature and philosophy.
The Mycenaean Linear B script, used for administration and mainly found in palace archives, fell into desuetude during the Dark Ages. Consisting of 87 syllabic and over 100 ideographic signs, Linear B derived from the as yet undeciphered Linear A, used by the non-Greek Minoans to record their mysterious language or languages.
By 770 BCE, close contact with the Phoenicians in the east led to the adoption of a phonetic system of language notation. The Greeks adapted the Phoenician abjad (an alphabet with only consonants), which had been developed for a semitic language, to include vowels, thereby creating the basis for our own modern alphabet.
Significantly, this phonetic script was no longer the preserve of an elite of priests and scribes, used to reaffirm royal power, but a common good, used, more and more, to argue and debate and question the status quo. Life in the emerging city-states [poleis] no longer centred on the royal acropolis, now turned over to the gods, but on the public square or agora, and the nearby law courts where large citizen juries listened to long, elaborate speeches and grew familiar with the concept of objective truth.
The Pre-Socratics and their significance
In Plato’s Protagoras, Socrates numbers Thales of Miletus (c. 624-c. 548 BCE) among the Seven Sages of Greece. Thales held that the Earth floats on water, which is the primary substance from which all else is made. ‘Presumably’ says Aristotle, ‘he derived this assumption from seeing that the nutriment of everything is moist…’ Or perhaps he derived it from similar Egyptian, Babylonian, and Hebrew accounts of creation. But in a break with these traditions, he sought to explain the world without resorting to myths and gods, which is why he is often regarded as the first genuine philosopher, as well as the first genuine scientist. When Bertrand Russell (d. 1970) declared that ‘philosophy begins with Thales’, he was, in fact, merely agreeing with Aristotle.
Anaximander of Miletus (c. 610-546 BCE) took Thales as a model and starting point. Like Thales, he sought for the primary substance, or arkhē, which he identified not with water but with apeiron [‘the boundless’]. The Earth, he held, is a cylinder with a height of one-third of its diameter. Thales had claimed that the Earth floats upon water, without specifying what the water might rest upon. Anaximander got round this problem by positing that the cylinder need not be supported: because it is in the middle of everything, there is no reason for it to move in one direction over another. As far as we know, this is the oldest argument founded on the principle of sufficient reason, according to which every instance of change requires a reason or cause.
Anaximenes of Miletus (c. 586-c.526 BCE), a contemporary of Anaximander, rejected apeiron and replaced it with his own arkhē, aēr [air, but also mist and vapour]. The Earth is a flat disc that floats on a cushion of aēr. Anaximenes elaborated upon Thales and Anaximander by positing a mechanism, or two mechanisms, rarefaction and condensation, by which his arkhē might pass into and out of everything else. When aēr is rarefied, it becomes fire; when it is condensed, it becomes wind, then cloud, then water, then stones… To support this thesis, Anaximenes appealed to a simple experiment: when one exhales on one’s hand, the air is hot; but if one blows through pursed lips, the air becomes cold and dense. With his emphasis on change and its process, Anaximenes might be thought of as a forerunner of Heraclitus. The Milesian search for the basic material out of which all things are made may sound quaint and quixotic, until we remember that it is the same quest that our nuclear physicists are embarked upon—this time with the help of giant particle accelerators.
After the downfall of Miletus in 494 BCE, the epicentre of philosophy shifted westwards, away from Ionia and towards Athens and the cities of Italy. At the age of 40, Pythagoras of Samos (c. 560-c. 495 BCE), a contemporary of Anaximander and Anaximenes, left Samos for Croton in southern Italy, where he established a philosophically minded religious community. Music played an important role in Pythagoras’ community. Pythagoreans recited poetry, sang hymns to Apollo, and played on the lyre to cure illnesses of body and soul. One day, or so the story goes, Pythagoras passed by some blacksmiths at work, and found that their hammering produced especially pleasing sounds. He then noticed that their anvils were simple ratios of one another, one being half the size of the first, another twice the size, and so on. This insight led to his ‘harmony of the spheres’, according to which the movements of the heavenly bodies are in a mathematical relationship akin to that between musical notes, and, together, amount to a grand cosmic symphony. Some two thousand years later, the astronomer Johannes Kepler (d. 1630) held that, though inaudible, this ‘music of the spheres’ might nonetheless be heard by the soul. In the Metaphysics, Aristotle says that Plato’s teachings owed much to those of the Pythagoreans; so much, in fact, that Bertrand Russell upheld not Plato but Pythagoras as the most influential of all philosophers. Pythagoras’ influence is perhaps most evident in Plato’s emphasis on mathematics, and, more generally, reason and abstract thought, as a secure basis for the practice of philosophy.
Xenophanes (c. 570-c. 478 BCE) came from Colophon in Ionia, but left in his mid-twenties and ‘tossed about the Greek Land’ for 67 years—as he himself tells us in one of his 45 surviving fragments. He clearly knew of Pythagoras, whom he discusses in Fragment 7. Xenophanes criticized the likes of Homer and Hesiod for anthropomorphizing the gods (conceiving of them in human form) and portraying them as immoral or amoral. But far from being an atheist, he instead suggested that there is ‘one god, the greatest among gods and men, neither in form like unto mortals nor in thought’. He held that the primary substance is earth, while also acknowledging the importance of water to life. From the existence of inland fossils, he inferred that the earth had at one time been covered by the sea. Despite pronouncing himself on the weightiest matters, he warned that secure knowledge is impossible: ‘There never was or will be a man who has certain knowledge about the gods and about all the things I speak of. Even if he should chance to say the complete truth, yet he himself knows not that it is so.’ This subtle and original distinction between knowledge and true belief is further developed by Plato in the Theaetetus. Another skeptical (or proto-skeptical) point made by Xenophanes is that our perceptions and beliefs are relative and context-dependent: ‘If god had not made brown honey, men would think figs far sweeter than they do.’
Parmenides of Elea (c. 515-c. 440 BCE) in southern Italy may have been acquainted with Xenophanes, whose work he knew. In contrast to his contemporary Heraclitus (c. 535-475 BCE), who held that everything is in a state of flux (as epitomised by his saying that you cannot step twice into the same river), Parmenides argued that nothing ever changes. He wrote a poem, On Nature, which begins with a proem in which the narrator (presumably himself) ascends to the abode of an unnamed goddess.
To her guest, the goddess reveals the nature of reality, or ‘Way of Truth’—which I shall paraphrase for you:
What is, is, and it is impossible for it not to be. And what is not is not, and it is impossible for it to be. One cannot conceive of what is not, because one cannot think or speak about nothing. Conversely, if one can think or speak about something, then that thing must be, ‘for thought and being are the same.’ It being possible to think about reality, reality must be—and if it is, it cannot not be. Something cannot come into being, or pass out of being, because something cannot come into being from nothing, or pass from something into nothing. Thus, if something comes into being, it does so not from nothing but from something—so that it does not really come into being at all. From this, it follows that there can be no becoming and thus no real change, even though sense experience tells us otherwise. Motion is impossible because it would require moving into a void, that is, moving into nothing, which does not exist. If motion and change are impossible, the universe must consist of a single, undifferentiated, and indivisible unity—which Parmenides called, ‘the One’.
To bolster the philosophy of Parmenides, his follower and lover Zeno of Elea produced a set of paradoxical arguments such as ‘Achilles and the Tortoise’ designed to undermine ordinary beliefs about motion, space, time, and plurality. Aristotle outlines ‘Achilles and the Tortoise’ in the Physics: ‘In a race the quickest runner can never overtake the slowest, since the pursuer must first reach the point whence the pursued started, so that the slower must always hold a lead.’
What is new and revolutionary about ‘the Way of Truth’ is that it consists in a long chain of strictdeductive argumentation from premises that are taken to be necessary truths. The conclusion, startling though it is, seems to follow necessarily from the premises, posing a serious challenge to anyone defending a different or commonsense position. Two thousand years later, Descartes would embark on a similar project in search of truths deemed to be incontrovertible.
The pre-Socratics conceived of the universe as an ordered whole. They attempted to explain its fundamental features without resorting to myths and gods. Instead of accounting for the here and now by the supposed beginning, they accounted for the supposed beginning by the here and now. In so doing, they gave rise to the very idea of philosophy and science, and, more pertinently for us, to the rules or principles of reasoning on which they rely. Reason, after all, is the understanding of causes, which is why it is called ‘reason’. What may have come as a surprise to them, especially after Parmenides, is that reason could conflict with ordinary sense experience—perhaps more so even than mythology and religion.
Other scientific or academic attitudes adopted by the Pre-Socratics include conceiving of the world as intelligible; searching for knowledge for its own sake; asking bold questions without fear or favour; developing and manipulating abstract concepts; and privileging elegant and economical explanations.
At the same time, many pre-Socratics, such as Pythagoras and Empedocles, retained something of a mystical streak. Like the mythologists of old, they were more interested in cosmogony than in uncovering the laws of nature, that is, more interested in grand narratives than in formulating empirically verifiable hypotheses. Although familiar with the work of their forebears and contemporaries—and, it seems, highly driven by it—they did not rigorously critique one another in the way that Aristotle would do in writing a whole book on (or against) Democritus.
The Sophists
Now down from the ivory towers and back to the budding assemblies and law courts. The sophistic movement, which revolved around Golden Age Athens (480-404 BCE), owed to a concatenation of unusual social and political circumstances, not least: a renewed sense of self-confidence and optimism fuelled by the improbable repulsion of two Persian invasions; the great wealth flowing in from the maritime empire that had grown out of an anti-Persian defensive alliance; and an extreme participatory democracy in which the power to speak was the power to lead. Political power, however, was a double-edged sword, since prominent citizens were vulnerable to vexatious lawsuits—and, rather than hiring a lawyer, had to mount their own defence.
In this climate, the ability to speak became paramount, and the sophists—essentially teachers of rhetoric—converged upon Athens to deliver public lectures and private classes, typically to young aristoi with worldly ambitions. Other Greek poleis, especially in Sicily and Italy, also called upon their services, so that the chief sophists were continually on tour. When in Athens, they would often reside at the house of a patron such as the magnate Callias, at whose house Plato’s Protagoras is set, or the politician Callicles, at whose house Plato’s Gorgias is set. According to Plato, Callias owned ‘the greatest and most glorious house in Athens’ [Protagoras 337d] and ‘spent a world of money on the sophists’ [Apology20a].
In the Protagoras, Plato intimates that Protagoras invented the role of the professional sophist. Protagoras gravitated towards Athens and so impressed Pericles that, in 444, Pericles invited him to draft the constitution of Thurri, his experimental panhellenic colony on the Tarantine Gulf—settled, among others, by the historian Herodotus and the orator Lysias. Protagoras is perhaps best remembered for his maxim that ‘man is the measure of all things’, attacked in Plato’s Theaetetus on the grounds that, if true, nothing could be inherently true or false, or right or wrong—not even the maxim itself. According to Protagoras, the value of an opinion lies not in its truth but in its usefulness to the person who holds it, a slippery position that could readily be seized upon by scoundrels in search of self-justification.
Protagoras is also remembered for the outré opening of his lost work, About the Gods:
About the gods, I cannot be sure whether they exist or not, or what they are like to see; for many things stand in the way of the knowledge of them, both the opacity of the subject and the shortness of human life.
Protagoras charged extortionate fees for his services. According to Aulus Gellius, he once took on a pupil, Euathlus, on the understanding that he would be paid once Euathlus had won his first court case. However, Euathlus never won a case, and after a time Protagoras sued him for non-payment. Protagoras argued that if he won the case he would be paid, and if Euathlus won the case, he would still be paid, because Euathlus would then have won a case. Euathlus, having assimilated the methods of his master, retorted that if he won the case he would not have to pay, and if Protagoras won the case, he still would not have to pay, because he still would not have won a case! This so-called Paradox of the Court, and the concomitant Counterdilemma of Euathlus, is also told of Corax [‘Crow’] of Syracuse and his student Tisias, the nominal founders or inventors of rhetoric. One version ends with the judge throwing them both out of the court with the words, Kakou korakos kakon ōon [‘A bad egg from a bad crow’].
Sophistês [‘expert’] derives from sophos [‘wise’], and originally designated one who is learnt or skilled in a particular art or craft. But the term began to acquire derogatory connotations even before Plato, who held most sophists in contempt. The comedian Aristophanes had assimilated Socrates with the sophists, leading, ultimately, to the charges of impiety levied against the philosopher. To rehabilitate the reputation of Socrates, Plato laboured the contrast between Socrates and the sophists, whom he portrayed as venal and amoral and nothing like his poor and pious teacher. As a result, ‘sophistry’ has come to mean something like, ‘the self-interested use of clever but deceptive arguments.’ In an attempt to demarcate and elevate philosophy as a discipline, Plato also sought to undermine poets and orators and all those with a rival but less rigorous claim to the truth.
To be fair to Plato, it does seem that many sophists had a strong and potentially self-serving skeptical streak. Although they did raise many profound questions, they seemed more interested in expediency than in knowledge per se—their primary purpose being to create effective public speakers and enrich themselves in the process, without due regard for the consequences of creating a cohort of venal and amoral leaders. Their habit of undermining the traditional gods turned many conservatives and ordinary people against them, and, ultimately, against Socrates, who was condemned by (false) association.
Socrates and Plato
According to Plato, Socrates had an impetuous friend called Chaerephon, who one day went to Delphi and asked the oracle whether there was anyone wiser than Socrates. The oracle replied that there was no one wiser. Knowing only that he knew nothing, Socrates was perplexed. To discover the meaning of the oracle, he questioned several supposedly wise men—first the politicians, then the poets, and then the artisans—and in each case concluded: ‘I am likely to be wiser than he to this small extent, that I do not think I know what I do not know.’
Socrates was the wisest of men not because he knew everything or anything, but because he knew what he did not know—or, more subtly, because he knew the limits of the little that he did know. In contrast to the pre-Socratics and especially to the sophists, he seldom claimed to have any positive knowledge; whenever he did, it was always because he had learnt it from somebody else, or because he had been ‘divinely inspired’.
The ever-elusive Plato might also have intended the oracle story as an origin myth for the Socratic method, or method of elenchus, which consists in questioning one or more people about an ethical concept such as justice or virtue with the covert aim of exposing a contradiction in their initial (and often cherished) assumptions and provoking a reappraisal of the concept. As the process is iterative, it leads to an increasingly precise or refined definition of the concept, and, in due course, to a shared recognition that it eludes our understanding and that we know much less than we thought we did. With our dogmatism transmuted into a state of puzzlement and suspended judgement, we are ready to become much more open and subtle thinkers—assuming, of course, that we did not first become angry and resentful.
To have our understanding of a moral concept undermined is also to have our values undermined, and, with that, our sense of self. To manage their anger and other feelings, and to keep them talking, Socrates often flattered his interlocutors while himself playing the fool. In the Orator, Cicero esteems that, ‘for irony and dissimulation, [Socrates] far excelled all other men in the wit and genius which he displayed.’ Simon Blackburn in the Oxford Dictionary of Philosophy defines Socratic irony with brio as ‘Socrates’ irritating tendency to praise his hearers while undermining them, or to disparage his own superior abilities while manifesting them.’
Although Socrates may have perfected the method of elenchus, it is unlikely that he independently originated a mode of conversation that seems so naturally and fundamentally human. But it remains that while the sophists tried to make a show of their knowledge, Socrates tried to make a show of his and everyone else’s ignorance.
Behind the Socratic method, that is, the method of elenchus as perfected by Socrates, lies the search for rigorous definitions—because it helps, if one is to pronounce on something, to know exactly what that something is. For instance, in Plato’s Meno, Socrates tasks the aristocrat Meno with defining virtue; in the Laches, he tasks the general Laches with defining courage; and in the Euthyphro, he tasks the priest-prophet Euthyphro with defining piety. That Meno, who is philosophically trained, struggles to understand what Socrates is asking of him suggests that this search for rigorous definitions is something original and radical. For Socrates, it is not enough simply to define a concept in terms of itself or related concepts, or by a list of its instances, or according to convention or popular opinion (‘piety is what the gods all love’). Instead, a rigorous definition is one which, by picking out the essence of a concept, applies to all its instances and none more. For example, Meno’s definition of virtue as ‘the ability to rule over people’ is both too narrow for excluding children and slaves (who might also be virtuous), and too broad for including those who rule unjustly (and who are therefore not virtuous).
When seeking to define something, Socrates sometimes turns to the method of collection and division. In Plato’s Phaedrus, he responds to an orator’s speech on love with two speeches of his own. In his first speech, he debases love by claiming that it is a form of madness. But in his second, more considered, speech, he praises love for being ‘the highest form of madness’. Later in the dialogue, he points out that rhetoric has the most power with abstract notions such as ‘love’ and ‘justice’ that mean different things to different people and even to the same person from moment to moment. For this reason, in his second speech, he began by distinguishing between human and divine madness, and the four forms of divine madness (prophecy, mystic rites, poetry, and love). This, he says, involved collecting all the various forms of madness, and then dividing them up again ‘according to the natural formation’.
Occasionally, Socrates proceeded instead by the maieutic method, which is often confused with the method of elenchus. But whereas the Socratic method aims at aporia [suspension of belief], the maieutic method aims more properly at hypothesis generation and testing.
In Plato’s Theaetetus, the young Theaetetus contrasts his ease in defining mathematical terms with his difficulty in defining knowledge. He confesses that he has long pondered the problem of knowledge and suffers from his lack of an adequate solution. Socrates responds, ‘These are the pangs of labour, my dear Theaetetus; you have something within you which you are bringing forth.’ Socrates goes on to compare himself to a midwife [maia—hence, ‘maieutic method’] who works with men rather than women, and the soul rather than the body. Just as the midwife is beyond bearing age, so he too is barren—not of children, but of wisdom. All he can do is bring forth the wisdom of others and thoroughly examine it.
Once he understands what Socrates is asking of him, Theaetetus offers three definitions of knowledge (knowledge as perception, knowledge as true belief, and knowledge as true belief with an account, i.e. justified true belief), each of which is rejected, or falsified, by Socrates. So although the Theaetetus ends in aporia, it is more of an exploratory dialogue than a classic aporetic one. It is no coincidence that Theaetetus is a model of humility and perplexity: because he begins in aporia, or adogmatism, he is an ideal candidate for the more positive, collaborative maieutic method.
Yes, Socrates, and I am amazed when I think of [these kinds of contradiction]; by the Gods I am! And I want to know what on earth they mean; and there are times when my head quite swims with the contemplation of them.
I see, my dear Theaetetus, that Theodorus had a true insight into your nature when he said that you were a philosopher, for wonder is the feeling of a philosopher, and philosophy begins in wonder.
Aristotle
When, in 366, Plato returned from his second trip to Syracuse, he would have found a bright new face at the Academy. The young Aristotle began in Plato’s fold, even writing dialogues in the manner of Plato, but later diverged from him and founded his own school, the Lyceum.
Unlike Plato, Aristotle privileged observation over speculation. Like modern scientists, he began with a systematic gathering of data, from which he attempted to infer explanations and make predictions. He carried out dissections and even rudimentary experiments such as cutting out the heart of a turtle to discover that it could still move its limbs for a surprisingly long time. However, he did not carry out anything like modern case-control studies, and relied uncritically on the lay testimony of beekeepers, fishermen, travellers, and the like. This lack of rigour led to some embarrassing errors, such as the claim that lions copulate back-to-back, while bears adopt the missionary position and hedgehogs stand on their hind legs to face each other. Or the claim that the female of several species has fewer teeth than the male. Among these species, he included humans, when he could simply have looked into his wife or daughter’s mouth.
Aristotle referred to the branches of learning as ‘sciences’, and divided them into three groups: practical sciences, productive sciences, and theoretical sciences.
Practical sciences are concerned with right action and beautiful behaviour both at the level of the individual, as in ethics, and at the level of the community, as in politics.
Productive sciences are concerned with products or outcomes, and include, among many others, agriculture, architecture, ship-building, medicine, music, and rhetoric.
Theoretical sciences are concerned with knowledge for its own sake, and comprise both natural sciences and non-empirical forms of knowledge such as mathematic and metaphysics.
Logic, that is, the branch of learning that is concerned with the principles of intellectual inquiry, does not fit into this tripartite division of the sciences, but underpins them all, and stands alone and apart under the heading of Organon [‘Tool’].
Aristotle’s logic, or ‘analytics’ as he called it, is the first ever systematic study of human reasoning, and the second ever formal system after the Astadhyayi [Sanskrit grammar] of Panini. At the end of Sophistical Refutations (the sixth and last book of the Organon), Aristotle himself says that, in most cases, discoveries lean upon the achievements of others, but in this case, ‘Nothing existed at all… we had absolutely nothing else of an earlier date to mention, but were kept at work for a long time in experimental researches.’ More than two thousand years later, no less an authority than Immanuel Kant (d. 1804) deemed Aristotle’s logic to be complete and unsurpassed.
In fact, Chrysippus (d. c. 206 BCE), the third scholarch of the Stoic school, had developed a more sophisticated system of propositional logic. In the third century CE, Diogenes Laertius wrote that Chrysippus was so renowned for dialectic [reasoned argument] that ‘most people thought, if the gods took to dialectic, they would adopt no other system than that of Chrysippus.’ However, Stoic logic came to be lost—along with the more than seven hundred works of Chrysippus (who might otherwise have been a household name)—while Aristotle’s deductive or syllogistic logic came to dominate.Because logic seemed capable of uncovering the hidden truths of nature, the Aristotelian system was heavily taken up in the monasteries and madrasas. In Islamic scholarship, Aristotle’s Rhetoric and Poetics came to be appended to the Organon, and it is true that the works lie on a spectrum: whereas the Organon is about uncovering the truth, the Rhetoric and Poetics are about instilling it in less philosophical types.
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