The Sophists

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1. Athens in late 5c B.C.E.
   • Public Debate
   • Legal proceedings
   • rhetoric and "informal logic"
   • Reflection on speech & persuasion

2. The Sophists
   • professionals
   • itinerants
   • the first "business consultants"

3. Themes of the Sophists
   • practical advice & training
   • rhetoric: argument and persuasion
     • Protagoras and the double dilemma
   • concentration on moral and political topics
     • ARETE
     • Does might make right?
     • the NOMOS-PHYSIS debate
   • liberal, democratic, skeptical & relativistic tendencies
     • Protagoras: the human being as the measure
     • radical sophists

4. Individual Sophists
   • Protagoras
   • Callicles
   • Gorgias
   • Antiphon
   • Thrasymachus

5. Were the Sophists slandered?
   • Plato & Aristotle: the heavy artillery
   • Aristophanes' view
   • Can Thucydides be regarded as a Sophist?

revised September 22, 1996


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