The Sophists
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1. The Sophists developed their movement at a time when moral standards were disintegrating and religion was decaying, and the morality they offered was a practical one in that it was based on precepts telling people how to get along with other people. Different Sophists taught somewhat different doctrines. Much of what we know about the Sophists has come down to us in the writings of Plato, though he was opposed to the Sophists and so should not be considered an uninterested observer. The Sophists considered the nature of law and whether law could be viewed as something objective, a scientific certainty to be applied to the world. Essentially, the Sophists found that there was no way to know whether there could be such a law or not and that therefore there was no reason to seek it. The Sophists saw themselves as enlightened when compared to the superstitious Greeks who had gone before, and they thus no longer believed in the gods as the source of a law for mankind. Morality could not be tested by recourse to the teachings of the gods, then, and indeed the enlightened individual knew that the law was a matter of human creation, a matter of accepted convention rather than objective certitude. Assuming that the law is only a convention, then, the issue is why we should obey it:Protagoras argued in favor of obedience to the law not because obedience is "right" but simply because it is advantageous (Jones 69). Later Sophists argued that there is no real "justice" or "ri
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expresses a relative concept of justice, a concept that changes according to the situation and that can be seen as a Sophistic point of view. Socrates argues against this point of view and for the idea that the idea of natural law applies not only to individuals but to the state as well. The Greek city-state is made up of individuals who are part of the state in the aggregate. For the individuals to live a good life, they also need a good state. Indeed, the fact that they live a good life can create a good state. For Plato, there is an objective morality by which to judge the good.
Works Cited
Jones, W.T. The Classical Mind. New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1970.
Nisbet, Robert. The Social Philosophers. New York: Washington Square Press, 1973.
Palmer, Donald. Looking at Philosophy. Mountain View, California: Mayfield Publishing, 1994.
2. Protagoras was part of the group of philosophers known as the Sophists. For Protagoras, all customs were relative rather than absolute, and he saw everything as relative to human subjectivity (Palmer 40). For Protagoras, epistemology involves certain procedural realities that make metaphysics a relative matter and not a matter of absolute truth, which cannot be perceived
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Approximate Word count = 1591
Approximate Pages = 6 (250 words per page)
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