 Hi, I'm Peter Adamson, and you're listening to the History of Philosophy podcast, brought to you with the support of King's College London and the Leverhulme Trust. Today's episode? Making the weaker argument the stronger – the sophists. The word sophist is, nowadays, a term of abuse. If you call someone a sophist, you're accusing them of using bad arguments, arguments which are deceptively plausible, but in fact, totally bogus. Worse still, sophistry is arguing badly on purpose, trying to pull the wool over people's eyes by weaving a web of confusing and misleading words. How can this be, given that the word sophist derives from the Greek word for wisdom, sophia? The word sophistes, or sophist, originally meant something like a wise man. So how did it come to have these fraudulent associations, to the point that a sophist is almost the reverse of a wise person, someone who was out to undermine the search for wisdom? As usual, the culprits are Plato and Aristotle, who very successfully tarred the Greek sophist with the brush of duplicity and underhandedness. For them, and hence for us, sophistry means using rhetorical techniques to induce persuasion without regard to truth, or using argumentative tricks to embarrass an opponent. Aristotle even wrote a work called The Sophistical Refutations, in which he warns the reader about the sophist's tricks, teaching us how to diagnose and avoid their chicanery. But despite their poor reputation, the sophist made a major contribution to the history of philosophy. This isn't to say that they were philosophers, exactly, though they did put forward ideas which we might see as philosophical. It's more that their impact on Socrates, and especially Plato, was enormous. A truly great philosopher benefits from a truly provocative opponent. There's no greater philosopher than Plato, and he got the most provocative opponent he could have asked for, in the shape of the sophists. It's interesting to note that, whereas only one Platonic dialogue came to be titled with the name of a pre-Socratic philosopher, Parmenides, Plato wrote dialogues named after four of the most important sophists, Protagoras, Gorgias, Hippias, and Euthydemus. Another dialogue is called simply The Sophist. In it, the characters try to define the word sophist, and discover that the sophist is, even in this sense, difficult to pin down. Sophists play a major role in several other dialogues, including what I personally consider to be Plato's two greatest dialogues, The Republic and The Theaetetus. In short, Plato was obsessed with the sophists, and he returned to them again and again, treating them with a mixture of humor, fascination, dismay, and disdain. So, to understand Plato, we need to understand the sophists. And to understand the sophists, we need to understand a little bit about Athens in the 5th century BC. We've actually been talking about the 5th century for numerous episodes now, because pre-Socratics like Empedocles, Anaxagoras, the Eliatics, and the Atomists were all working in this period. But I haven't said much yet about the historical situation. There would be a lot to say, since this is the most eventful century of ancient Greek history. But, to make a very long story very short, in the first part of the century the Greeks faced down the threat of invasion from the Persians in 480 and 479 BC. In the wake of this famous victory, Athens stepped to the forefront of power in the Greek world. As we've seen already, much of the Mediterranean Sea was an arena for Greek power, which extended itself through the establishment of colonies stretching from the Black Sea region to modern-day Turkey to Italy and Sicily. Athens' dominant position in the middle of the 5th century was based on their dominance of the sea. As the greatest maritime power, they could intimidate other Greek cities and grow extremely rich. They formed an alliance with other city-states, in theory for defensive purposes called the Delian League. The name comes from the island of Delos, where the treasury of the League was kept before it was moved to Athens. Ultimately, Athens' overweening power provoked a backlash from an alliance of city-states led by Sparta. This was the Peloponnesian War, a protracted conflict which finally led to the breaking of Athenian hegemony in 404 BC. In terms of rhetoric, and to a considerable extent in terms of real politics, democracy was at the core of the Athenian domination of the Greek world in the middle of the 5th century. Athens preferred to ally itself with other democratic city-states, and liked to contrast itself to non-democratic Sparta. Even Athens' naval power may have been linked to its democratic institutions. You needed a lot of people to row the Greek boats called triremes, whereas the Greek hoplite army, which fought on land, was made up of richer citizens who can afford the armor and weapons. So, it's plausible to think that Athens' investment in naval power went hand in hand with their democratic practices. I'll leave it to the proper historians to evaluate this idea. The main point is that Athens was indeed democratic, albeit in a way rather different than we recognize. For one thing, of course, this was a democracy of male citizens, excluding women and slaves. Citizens representing the various territories in and around Athens would form a decision-making assembly. Membership of this, and the holding of other political offices, was decided by lot, but the randomly appointed assembly was then empowered to choose certain directly elected officials including the military leaders. It was this mechanism which allowed individual men to achieve and retain lasting political power, even in Athens with its lottery-based democratic system. In the middle of the 5th century, Athens was ruled above all by one man, Pericles. He led Athens through years of peace and then into the Peloponnesian War, which began in 431 BC, two years before Pericles died in 429. Pericles is important for us because he is associated with both philosophers and sophists. From among the philosophers, he's connected especially with Anaxagoras, who seems to have been a kind of mentor for Pericles. You might remember this from the episode on Anaxagoras. Anaxagoras' trial for impiety, which I also mentioned briefly, may well have been in part due to his political associations as well as his genuinely challenging beliefs. For instance, he denied the divinity of the heavenly bodies, and most Athenians would have found this scandalous. From among the sophists, Pericles is associated especially with Protagoras. He appointed Protagoras to write the laws for an Athenian colony in southern Italy. Like several other major sophists, Protagoras wasn't from Athens, but rather from Abdera, which also gave us Democritus the atomist. Protagoras and other sophists naturally flocked to Athens because of its wealth and political dominance. Several of the sophists went to Athens on political embassies from their native cities, and these trips would have given them an opportunity to ply their trade. Athens was the perfect place to be a sophist. The city's elite was flush with cash, an attractive proposition for sophists who could apparently command a startlingly large fee for their services. Just as important was Athens' democratic constitution. In this regime, persuasion was the key to political power. If you wanted to advance an Athenian society and become an influential gentleman, you needed to be able to speak well in order to sway the assembly. This is what the sophists taught their students to do, to speak persuasively on any topic. The skills they offered could also be of great use in the law courts, where similarly, what was needed was a facility for convincing an audience. According to Plato, this is what sophistry was all about, teaching persuasive techniques for an exorbitant fee. And there's plenty of other evidence that they did teach their students to speak persuasively, both in public and in private, at length or in the cut and thrust of debate, on any and all topics. But we can also see the sophists in a more positive light. They were a part of the more general flowering of Greek culture in the 5th century BC, which, let's remember, produced great historians like Herodotus and Thucydides, great artists like the sculptor Phidias, and great playwrights like Sophocles, Euripides, and Aristophanes. The sophists contributed to this culture, pioneering in the literary analysis of Homer and other texts, and reaching a new sophistication in the use of language. That was especially true of a sophist named Protacus. His specialty was carefully distinguishing the meanings of words. For example, Plato depicts him insisting that in order to be civil, one should debate, but not argue. Plato also mentions that Protacus was a teacher of Socrates. In one dialogue, Socrates says that he could unfortunately only afford to attend Protacus's cheap one drachma lecture, and so missed out on the full version, which cost 50 drachmas. There's some fun being had at Protacus's expense here, but Socrates's constant search to define what virtue is, what courage is, and so on could be seen as a development of the linguistic precision urged by Protacus. Beyond language and rhetoric, we know that the sophists were active in a wide variety of fields, including mathematics, for example. The best example of the sophist as an all-around wise man was Hippias. Plato has some fun with him, too. He tells us that Hippias once attended the Olympic Games, having personally made everything he brought with him. He wove his own clothing, cobbled his own shoes, even made the rings he wore on his fingers. And of course he brought speeches, ready to talk on any subject. He was, in short, an expert in all human wisdom, as he announced proudly to anyone who would stand still long enough to listen. So it would be wrong to think that the sophists were narrowly concerned with the practice of persuasive speech-making. Still, from a philosophical point of view, the sophists' most relevant ideas all relate somehow to the value of persuasion. They were not dispassionate seekers of truth, but advocates and wordsmiths, more akin to political advisors or spin doctors than to academic researchers. At their most radical, the sophists could occasionally be moved to suggest that there is no absolute truth to be found, and that persuasion is all we have. This idea is associated especially with the greatest of the sophists, Protagoras. Like other major sophists, he received a high fee for his services, and in return, he claimed to teach something of enormous value. If you wanted to know how to make a convincing speech, he could certainly help. But he offered more. He offered virtue. Our most substantial piece of evidence for Protagoras' teaching on these matters is, unfortunately, in Plato's dialogue, the Protagoras. The reason I say this is unfortunate is that Plato was a genius of world-shattering proportions, and therefore thoroughly unreliable. He used historical figures as characters, and did with them whatever his artistry demanded. We can't trust Plato to give us the straight story on Socrates or Protagoras any more than we can trust Shakespeare to give us the straight story on the English kings. Still, most people think that the so-called great speech put into Protagoras' mouth by Plato probably represents the real Protagoras' attitudes reasonably well. In this speech, Protagoras portrays political virtue as a gift from gods to men, which is shared out equally to all. That is, everyone can partake of virtue, unlike more specialized skills like flute playing. It's for this reason, says Protagoras, that we punish people when they fall short of what virtue would demand. On the other hand, not everyone is equally virtuous, and this is where Protagoras comes in. He, after all, is able to teach people how to be more virtuous than they are by nature. I'm so confident was Protagoras that he would accept as payment whatever his students felt that the tuition was worth. On this note, I can't resist repeating the following anecdote, even if it has the whiff of legend about it. A pupil of Protagoras refused to pay him, and they were to meet in court to settle the matter. Protagoras said the pupil should simply cough up the fee in advance. After all, the student would either win or lose his case. If he lost, he'd have to pay the fee. But if he won, he would thereby prove that Protagoras had earned his fee by teaching the student to argue effectively in court, so he should pay either way. But if you remember just one thing about Protagoras, don't remember that story. Remember his famous remark that, quote, Man is the measure of all things, of the things that are, that they are, of the things that are not, that they are not. In this brief statement, we have the roots of an ancient and, to many, disturbing philosophical tradition, relativism. This is how Plato understood Protagoras. He was saying that each man judges what is true for him, but no one is in a position to judge what is true for anyone else. On this interpretation, Protagoras was saying that truth is always something's being true for someone, so that it could be true for me, that the wind is cold, and true for you, that the wind is warm. There is no such thing as the way the wind really is in itself. There is only the way things seem to us. On the face of it, this doctrine looks hard to square with Protagoras' claim to be a teacher of virtue. After all, if virtue is for me whatever I think it is, then why do I need Protagoras to teach me about it? In another dialogue, the Theaetetus, Protagoras gives his answer, virtue is really what is advantageous to me. What Protagoras teaches me is not what would be best absolutely, but what would be best for me, meaning from my point of view. This assimilation of virtue to what is advantageous is a key tenet of the Sophists, and a somewhat different version of it shows up repeatedly in Plato. In a dialogue called the Gorgias, Socrates battles against the claim that virtue is the advantage not of just anybody, but of those who are naturally stronger. Another Sophist named Thrasymachus defends the same idea in the first book of Plato's Republic. Here we have an application of Protagoras' position to the sphere of morality. If there is no absolute truth, then there is nothing but advantage, and by rights what should happen is that the strongest people should get the best rewards. But why think the strongest people should get more than the weak? In fact, how can the Sophists even use the word should if they reject absolute morality? Here the Sophists could turn to a distinction they like to draw between custom and nature. It is only by custom that there are social rules and laws of justice, and these laws may or may not reflect the natural order of things. It's natural for the strong to dominate the weak, whereas it is a mere custom for the weak to band together and restrict the power of the strong. Thrasymachus and other radical Sophists saw themselves as speaking up for nature, and unmasking morality as nothing but social convention. Protagoras himself probably drew more benign conclusions from his man is the measure doctrine. For Protagoras, the point was to educate people so as to make their lives seem better, that is, more advantageous. If he could make your life seem better to you, then would you really care whether there was anything real behind the seeming? He was willing to bet his fee that you wouldn't. Furthermore, Protagoras had ways of showing that you aren't going to get at reality, even if you insist on trying. He was a pioneer in the paradigmaticly-sophistic activity of making arguments on both sides of an argument. We have a later text by an anonymous Sophist called simply Double Arguments, which shows how to argue on both sides of several philosophical issues, for instance whether there is any difference between justice and injustice. There's a disturbing implication here. If one can always argue with equal plausibility on both sides of any debate, then arguing won't get us to the truth. We're simply going to be persuaded by whichever argument is presented more effectively. The Sophists were duly renowned for claiming that they could make the weaker argument the stronger. This boast was the sort of thing that made Plato shudder, but it makes a certain amount of sense. After all, you don't need an expensive lawyer or Sophist to help you win a court case when you're clearly innocent. You need one when it looks pretty certain that you're guilty. That brings us to another great Sophist, Gorgias. Like Pericles, Gorgias is associated with pre-Socratic philosophy. He came from Sicily, and it seems that he was influenced by his fellow Sicilian Empedocles. Gorgias, like Protagoras, was more interested in persuasion than philosophy. Unlike Protagoras, however, Gorgias went out of his way to deny that he could teach virtue. And in fact, he stressed the moral neutrality of his art of rhetoric. In the dialogue named after Gorgias, Plato has him say that rhetoric is a bit like boxing. If a trainer teaches someone to box, and he goes out and beats people up, this isn't the trainer's fault. Similarly, if Gorgias teaches a politician to argue effectively, then it's not his fault if the politician uses his newfound power for evil instead of good. On the other hand, Gorgias emphasizes that the ability he teaches is a lot more potent than boxing. For an expert rhetorician, like himself, can speak persuasively on any topic. He is the one who can persuade the patient to take medicine, even when the doctor can't. We might distrust Plato here. Isn't he just trotting out his favourite accusation, that the Sophists were abandoning knowledge for the sake of persuasion? Well, yes. But we do have another source where Gorgias speaks about the almost magical power of rhetoric. He wrote a display speech, which happily survives today, showing how he would defend the notorious Helen, who allowed herself to be seduced and thus triggered the Trojan War. The central part of the speech argues that if Helen was persuaded to go off to Troy, then she was helpless to resist. Persuasive speech, says Gorgias, is like a drug. If a skilled user of words really wants you to do something, you're going to do it, as surely as if someone were to come along and use physical force on you. As with other Sophists, there was more to Gorgias than this. He wrote an equally fascinating, if very weird, text which we also have. This work, called On Not Being, is a mind-bending parody of the Eliatic philosophers. Whereas Parmenides and company showed that being is one and unchanging, Gorgias argues, with a series of absurdly complicated proofs, that there is no such thing as either being or non-being, and that if there were being or non-being, we could neither know about it nor say anything about it. While this was surely intended at least partly as a mockery of Parmenides or his followers, Gorgias doubtless had a serious point too. Like Protagoras, Gorgias was pulling the rug out from under philosophers with their ambitious theories of underlying reality. If there's no reality to get at, and in fact no unreality either, as Gorgias argues in On Non-Being, then we're left only with the way things seem to us. This kind of world, of course, suits the Sophist, who operates always at the level of seeming, of plausibility and persuasion. You can now begin to understand why Plato found the Sophist so alarming. The Sophist outlook was, as it were, the diametrical opposite of Platonism. But of course, before there was Platonism, there was Socrates. Because Socrates is now seen as a martyred saint of philosophy, we find it obvious to cast him in the role of the Sophist's greatest adversary. Plato too puts Socrates in this role. So it may come as a surprise to discover that at least one other contemporary, who knew more about both Socrates and the Sophist than we do, saw little distinction between them. He just lumped Socrates in with the Sophists. This was the comic poet Aristophanes. He will be one of our main sources next week as we start to look at Socrates, but without seeing him through the lens of Plato's dialogues. Instead, we will be examining the portrayal of Socrates in two other authors, Aristophanes and the historian Xenophon. That's Socrates without Plato, next time on The History of Philosophy Without Any Gaps.