he human mind, and its reason, logic and rhetoric can argue either side, but they cannot come to any true conclusion about goodness, simply because the definition of goodness depends on who is doing the defining. The Sophists were from cities other than Athens, and they questioned the findings of the Athenian philosophers, such as Socrates, with respect to their findings:
Was [Athenians'] distinction between Greeks and barbarians . . . [and] that between masters and slaves, based upon evidence or simply upon prejudice. . . . The Sophists' . . . encyclopedic knowledge of different cultures made them skeptical about the possibility of attaining any absolute truth by which a society might order its life (Stumpf 32).
Applying the Sophists' standards to the work of Plato, for example, reveals that Socrates--if Plato is reporting his ideas accurately--did not always practice the kind
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