Plato's Counterfeit Sophists explores the place of the sophists within the Greek wisdom tradition, and argues against their almost universal exclusion from serious intellectual traditions. This book seeks to offer a revised history of the development of Greek philosophy, as well as of the potential--yet never realized--courses it might have followed.
Draws out numerous affinities between the sophists and Socrates in Platos dialogues. Are the sophists merely another group of villains in Platos dialogues, no different than amoral rhetoricians such as Thrasymachus, Callicles, and Polus? Building on a wave of recent interest in the Greek sophists, The Sophists in Platos Dialogues argues that, contrary to the conventional wisdom, there exist important affinities between Socrates and the sophists he engages in conversation. Both focused squarely on aret? (virtue or excellence). Both employed rhetorical techniques of refutation, revisionary myth construction, esotericism, and irony. Both engaged in similar ways of minimizing the potential friction that sometimes arises between intellectuals and the city. Perhaps the most important affinity between Socrates and the sophists, David D. Corey argues, was their mutual recognition of a basic epistemological insightthat appearances (phainomena) both physical and intellectual were vexingly unstable. Such things as justice, beauty, piety, and nobility are susceptible to radical change depending upon the angle from which they are viewed. Socrates uses the sophists and sometimes plays the role of sophist himself in order to awaken interlocutors and readers from their dogmatic slumber. This in turn generates wonder (thaumas), which, according to Socrates, is nothing other than the beginning of philosophy.
This is an English translation of four of Plato’s dialogue (Protagoras, Euthydemus, Hippias Major, and Cratylus) that explores the topic of sophistry and philosophy, a key concept at the source of Western thought. Includes notes and an introductory essay. Focus Philosophical Library translations are close to and are non-interpretative of the original text, with the notes and a glossary intending to provide the reader with some sense of the terms and the concepts as they were understood by Plato’s immediate audience.
This volume reconstructs Martin Heidegger's lecture course at the University of Marburg in the winter semester of 1924-25, which was devoted to an interpretation of Plato and Aristotle. Published for the first time in German in 1992 as volume 19 of Heidegger's Collected Works, it is a major text not only because of its intrinsic importance as an interpretation of the Greek thinkers, but also because of its close, complementary relationship to Being and Time, composed in the same period. In Plato's Sophist, Heidegger approaches Plato through Aristotle, devoting the first part of the lectures to an extended commentary on Book VI of the Nichomachean Ethics. In a line-by-line interpretation of Plato's later dialogue, the Sophist, Heidegger then takes up the relation of Being and non-being, the ontological problematic that forms the essential link between Greek philosophy and Heidegger's thought.
Two masterpieces of Plato's later period. The Theaetetus offers a systematic treatment of the question "What is knowledge?" The Sophist follows Socrates' cross-examination of a self-proclaimed true philosopher.
This book offers an introduction to the Sophists of fifth-century Athens and a new overall interpretation of their thought. Since Plato first animadverted on their activities, the Sophists have commonly been presented as little better than intellectual mountebanks - a picture which Professor Kerferd forcefully challenges here. Interpreting the evidence with care, he shows them to have been part of an exciting and historically crucial intellectual movement. At the centre of their teaching was a form of relativism, most famously expressed by Protagoras as 'Man is the measure of all things', and which they developed in a wide range of views - on knowledge and argument, virtue, government, society, and the gods. On all these subjects the Sophists did far more than simply provoke Plato to thought. Their contributions were substantial and serious; they inaugurated the debate on many central philosophical questions and decisively shifted the focus of philosophical attention from the cosmos to man.
A Companion to Ancient Education presents a series of essays from leading specialists in the field that represent the most up-to-date scholarship relating to the rise and spread of educational practices and theories in the ancient Greek and Roman worlds. Reflects the latest research findings and presents new historical syntheses of the rise, spread, and purposes of ancient education in ancient Greece and Rome Offers comprehensive coverage of the main periods, crises, and developments of ancient education along with historical sketches of various educational methods and the diffusion of education throughout the ancient world Covers both liberal and illiberal (non-elite) education during antiquity Addresses the material practice and material realities of education, and the primary thinkers during antiquity through to late antiquity
Are the sophists merely another group of villains in Plato's dialogues, no different than amoral rhetoricians such as Thrasymachus, Callicles, and Polus? Building on a wave of recent interest in the Greek sophists, The Sophists in Plato's Dialogues argues that, contrary to the conventional wisdom, there exist important affinities between Socrates and the sophists he engages in conversation. Both focused squarely on aretē (virtue or excellence). Both employed rhetorical techniques of refutation, revisionary myth construction, esotericism, and irony. Both engaged in similar ways of minimizing the potential friction that sometimes arises between intellectuals and the city. Perhaps the most important affinity between Socrates and the sophists, David D. Corey argues, was their mutual recognition of a basic epistemological insight—that appearances (phainomena) both physical and intellectual were vexingly unstable. Such things as justice, beauty, piety, and nobility are susceptible to radical change depending upon the angle from which they are viewed. Socrates uses the sophists and sometimes plays the role of sophist himself in order to awaken interlocutors and readers from their dogmatic slumber. This in turn generates wonder (thaumas), which, according to Socrates, is nothing other than the beginning of philosophy.
Masterfully leading the reader through the seven scenes of the drama, Cropsey shows how they are, to an astonishing degree, concerned with the resources available to help us survive in such a world.
