What Was Sophistry?

Robert C. Bartlett : Sophistry and Political Philosophy: Protagoras' Challenge to Socrates . (Chicago : University of Chicago Press , 2016. Pp. 272.)

A Symposium on Robert C. Bartlett's Sophistry and Political Philosophy: Protagoras' Challenge to Socrates

The work before us, along with the recent one by Dustin Sebell, The Socratic Turn (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2016), may evidence a long overdue reassessment of what we call the pre-Socratics and the sophists. Although I use these terms owing to their familiarity, it is always worth reminding ourselves that these bodies of thought are largely the construction of later interpretation and scholarship based on what was widely accepted as the intellectual triumph of classical natural right over ancient skepticism.¹That victory is not presented by Plato as self-evident or certain in his Socratic dialogues. Socrates does not always use the term "sophist" in a pejorative way, and he shows some of them, notably Protagoras, more respect than others. In my view, Socrates is presented in the dialogues as attempting to enlist some of them to act as rhetorical intermediaries in the pursuit of virtuous-character formation through their greater insight into demotic speech, with mixed results. The pre-Socratics did not of course realize that this was to be their place in posterity, since they did not know they were pre- anything. Moreover, in contrast with a great deal of modern scholarship, there is no hard and fast distinction between these two sets of thinkers, pre-Socratics and sophists. Gorgias, for example, usually classed as a sophist, was the pupil of Empedocles, usually classed as a pre-Socratic. Many of those writings normally designated as being by sophists are permeated with the cosmological speculations of those normally designated as the pre-Socratics. Socrates himself makes this clear when in the Theaetetus he says that all "the wise in succession" with the exception of Parmenides, and including Heraclitus, Empedocles, Homer, and certainly Protagoras, believed that nature was the "offspring" of "flow and motion," that "nothing ever is but is always becoming," that things sprang unfathomably into being, or as the Athenian Stranger puts it in his summation of this whole pedigree in Laws X, "according to chance" and "out of necessity."

Bartlett several times refers to Socrates as "prophesying," concluding with...