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Sophists
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The original writings of the Sophists are lost. The primary source for knowledge about them is Plato who was very negative about their ideas and their methods. Plato considered the Sophists to be dishonest since they were more interested in winning arguments than establishing truth and justice. In his writings, Plato depicts Socrates as an example of wisdom and virtue who defeats the Sophists and their arguments. Aristotle... was critical of the relativism of the Sophists. The term “Sophist” eventually came to have negative overtones.
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Sophists were a group of loosely connected group of individuals from the 5th and early 4th centuries B.C. Sophist means a teacher of rhetoric. It came from the term sophites which meant wise, prudent, statesmanlike or skilled at one's craft. They were basically traveling teachers that charged a fee for their lessons. "They taught many different things including public speaking, grammar, linguistic theory, moral and political doctrines, doctrines about god and nature and the origins of man, literary analysis and criticism, mathematics, and physical theories of the universe." Basically they would teach whatever was in demand. There were others but the most famous sophists include Protagoras of Abdera, who is considered the first of the sophists, Euclides of Megara, Hippias Of Elias, Prodicus of Ceos, and Gorgias of Leontini.
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Only fragments of the Sophists' writings have survived, and it is from Plato that they are mainly known. Plato gives a vivid picture of an assembly of Sophists in his dialogue Protagoras, and in another dialogue, the Sophist, he discusses more formally what he takes to be the essence of their thought. His attitude is generally hostile, though he does allow a tenuous intellectual link between them and his master, Socrates. But it is clear that the Sophists had an immense influence, largely via Plato himself, on a number of spheres, including the growth of logic, the philosophy of language, and epistemology, as well as on ethical and political theory.
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The Sophists certainly were not directly responsible for Athenian democracy, but their cultural and psychological contributions played an important role in its growth. They contributed to the new democracy in part by subjectifying truth, which allowed and perhaps required a tolerance of the beliefs of others. This liberal attitude would naturally have precipitated into the Athenian assembly as Sophists acquired increasingly high-powered clients [6]. Contiguous rhetorical training gave the citizens of Athens “the ability to create accounts of communal possibilities through persuasive speech” [7]. This was extremely important for the democracy, as it gave disparate and sometimes superficially unattractive views a chance to be heard in the Athenian assembly. Subjectified truths and communicatively enabled individuals were wonderful for the burgeoning democracy, and, in a sense, they were democracy itself.
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In an age questioning tradition, the Sophists characterized the Greek culture with their innovation. Prevalent in the middle of the fifth century BC, this group of scholars was part of the establishment of philosophy in history. However, their significance covers a wide variety of fields, typifying the value of the well-rounded citizen of the ancient world. The Sophists were first to make an occupation out of traveling to give public lectures. This was not an organized society or school, but a trend of individuals. For a fee, these men spoke on typical subjects such as math or grammar, but ... ranging to rhetoric, education, and ethics.
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The Sophists were ... interested in the cultural development of man as a member of society. The Sophists saw man himself as a product of nature, but society and civilization as artificial human products. On one hand, man is a natural creature subject to certain laws of nature which he cannot help but obey. On the other hand, he lives in a society, the rules and structure of which have no roots in nature and are based only on custom. The distinction here apparent is one between nature (physis) and custom or convention (nomos), a commonplace antithesis in fifth century literature popularized by the Sophists. One of the great controversies of the fifth century was whether the gods, human society and distinctions among human beings such as Greek and Barbarian, master and slave, were the result of physis or nomos, nature or custom.
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Sophists