11 characteristics of SOPHISTS in philosophy

In today's class we are going to talk about the main characteristics of the sophists, a group of philosophers who had a great importance in the Athens of the S.V a. c. These were great specialists of the oratory-rhetoric and the early professional philosophers. In addition, they were characterized by colliding directly with Socrates and for his defense of relativism, pragmatism, agnosticism and skepticism.

If you want to know more about the sophists, keep reading this lesson because in a PROFESOR we explain it to you in detail. Let's start!

Index

1. The sophists: short summary
2. What are the main characteristics of the sophists?
3. What was the thought of the sophists? Main ideas
4. What did the sophists teach?
5. The Sophists and Socrates

To understand the characteristics of sophists, we first have to study the context in which sophism arose. Thus, we must bear in mind that this current is born and develops inClassical Greece (S. Live. C.),

Likewise, we are in a Greece made up of cops with a assembly democracy (Pericles), in which all citizens met to discuss public issues in their city and create laws. Therefore, having a rhetoric and a strong speech became a key element in influencing the Assembly's decision-making. And precisely, under this development of rhetoric, politics and philosophy, the sophists were born and imposed themselves in Athens as knowledge specialists and as masters of rhetoric.

In short, by sophist we understand as one who teach wisdom, insofar as they are possessors of it, and the art of good government. Having as maximum representative Protagoras.

Main ideas of Protagoras

We know of the thought of Protagoras of Abdera (485-411 BC) C.) through third parties such as Plato, Aristotle or Diogenes Laertius. According to which, he would have written several works, although it is most likely that he only wrote two: On Truth and Antilogies.

In these works, Protagoras exposes his main philosophical ideas, among which are:

• relativism.
• Agnosticism.
• skepticism.
• conventionalism.
• Rhetoric and oratory.

Likewise, Protagoras stands out for his method known as heto the theory of contrary judgments (it was based on making a dialect debate with the aim of turning the weakest speech into the strongest) and for writing the constitution of the colony of Turia (in which for the first time there is talk of compulsory education for everyone).

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The main characteristics of the sophists are the following:

1. The sophists defend the rhetoric (analyze the forms and properties of a discourse) as a method to transmit knowledge. which is based on a closed speech and of an encyclopedic nature that is transmitted to some students who limited themselves to listening.
2. They defend the moral relativism: There is no universal way to know what is right or wrong.
3. According to the sophists truth is relative: They consider that there is no absolute truth and each person has their own vision of reality.
4. For the sophists, virtue is directly linked to fame and public recognition.
5. The philosopher is an individual who illustrates and teaches another person a know prepared and who charges for it, that is, he is the one who exercises a profession.
6. Lto philosophy it must be a discipline that teaches disciples the skills necessary for their development in politics, that is, to teach the art of oratory (debate and discuss) to be a convincing politician effective.
7. Teaching is passive: The teacher teaches and illustrates and the student listens. In addition, its main objective is to create good speakers who know how to seduce, persuade and convince with argumentative tricks, even if it is with a meaningless speech.
8. The sophists defend the democracy because it is a system that seeks create consensus and that generates a debate among citizens on the main issues that concern the city. However, they also defend that it should be developed by individuals prepared to do politics.
9. The sophists state that law is not eternal nor universal, but it is variable and changing depending on the group or community to which we approach. That is to say, that a law is imposed in a community as the result of a pact between its members or by the person who governs (conventionalism).
10. The happiness resides in the public recognition and in more superficial elements such as the fame or power.
11. They put aside the dilemma of the origin of the world (physis) and are concerned with issues that concern the individual: education, politics or justice.

In the thought of the sophists it is based on the following ideas:

Relativism

The sophists claim that there is no universal criterion in the human being that helps him to know how to judge what is really good or bad or what is true or false. Hence, Protagoras said:

“The human being is the measure of all things.

In the same way, they are going to establish that the laws or the customs are fixed in function of the fact that there are different ways of conceiving good or evil, that is, it is relative and varies depending on where we let's get closer Therefore, for example, what is good and correct for an Athenian is not for a Spartan, because they are cultures with different codes, because there are different moral systems just as valid and because it is a social construction.

Agnosticism

The sophists hold the idea that there is no certainty whether the gods exist or not and how they are physically and psychologically, since, according to them, there are many variables and factors that do not allow us to know 100%.

Thus, Xenophanes, would come to affirm that the divinity is a invention of human and that, therefore, the Greek gods are not the same as, for example, the Egyptians, because they obey the characteristics of a specific culture or community.

Pragmatism

The pragmatism is another of the bases of the sophists. According to the sophists, the acts and actions of a person are performed depending on whether they are beneficial/useful or harmful/useless to achieve a particular objective, goal or end, regardless of whether it is good or not: We could lie to obtain a own benefit. Therefore, our actions are not carried out based on whether they are good or bad.

Skepticism

For the sophists there is no entity in the world that establishes what is right or wrong, that is, they doubt and they question the absolute truth and the way in which we approach our reality. Which is due to the fact that there is no direct relationship between our mind and the real world (a Sometimes we can think things that are not true): We do not know if what our mind perceives is true or lie.

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The sophists, closely linked to the Athenian democratic system, devoted themselves professionally to teaching oratory (Know how to express oneself in public in a persuasive and convincing way) and rhetoric (knowing how to elaborate a speech in all its phases: content-structure, syntax, memorization and exposition) to the citizens who were mostly dedicated to the politics.

Well, we must bear in mind that we are at a time when it was considered that one of the essential virtues of politicians was knowing how to express themselves well and transmit their ideas in a convincing way to seduce their counterparts in the assembly of agora.

In short, the sophists taught the art of knowing how to express, know how to speak and defend an idea in exchange for a salary. And it is that, the sophists were the first philosophers to receive an honorarium in exchange for their services. Fact that caused them to be highly criticized by other great thinkers such as Socrates or Plato, which, came to say of them that they were traffickers and that they were not free to debate with people because they only talked to those who could pay them.

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In a Athens dominated by the sophists (who develop the profession of the philosopher), appears Socrates (470-399 BC C) for revolutionize philosophy and teaching: he did not charge for his classes, his classes were aimed at few individuals and his method was fully practical. In other words, for him, the student had to be an active subject, he had to be a participant in his own learning and not limit himself to obtaining knowledge in a theoretical way, as promulgated. the sophists. At the same time, he also became an uncomfortable character (“The Gadfly of Athens”) and established himself as a staunch opponent of sophist ideas.

In this way, the main differences between Socrates and the Sophists are the following:

• Socrates uses the dialectics, which is based on a dialogue (path to reason) between two interlocutors and whose purpose is that one of them helps to find the truth or the knowledge of the other through a series of questions that lead to thinking, to open the mind and to break with preconceived ideas.
• For Socrates Ito virtue and morals are directly linked to the presence or absence of knowledge (knowledge is the greatest of virtues and ignorance the greatest of vices) and hence, evil is the absence of knowledge of good and the product of ignorance. Thus, the person who acts badly is not out of wickedness but out of ignorance.
• According to Socrates, the philosopher he is a person who guides or helps another to bring out the truth or the intrinsic knowledge in our soul and who does not charge for it.
• for Socrates The philosophy must be practical and work dialoguing (question-answer), therefore, he did not write anything; he considered that writing it was wasting time to do the true philosophy, that it blurred its essence and that it ended up being obsolete.
• According to Socrates the truth is universal and it exists inside all of us (it is innate and latent), therefore, we can know it if we rescue/extract it from our interior.
• Socrates pretends educate in virtue and morality, that is, in creating fair citizensgood and wise.
• For Socrates the happiness does not reside in material goods or money, but in the interior order, in the awareness and balance of your own being.
• Socrates criticizes Democratic system as government, insofar as it allows ignorant people (people who are not specialists in politics) to come to power and make decisions.

If you want to read more articles similar to characteristics of the sophists, we recommend that you enter our category of Philosophy.

Antiseri and Reale. History of Philosophy. Vol. 1. Ed. Herder. 2010.