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PRACTICAL PHILOSOPHYTHE JOURNAL OF THE SOCIETY FOR PHILOSOPHY IN PRACTICEwww.practical-philosophy.org.uk www.society-for-philosophy-in-practice.org |
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PRACTICAL PHILOSOPHYTHE JOURNAL OF THE SOCIETY FOR PHILOSOPHY IN PRACTICEwww.practical-philosophy.org.uk www.society-for-philosophy-in-practice.org |
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The Older Sophists
Rosemary Kent Sprague (ed)
2001 Indianapolis: Hackett.
pp. x + 347. ISBN: 0-87220-556-8 (pb) £14.95, 0-87220-557-6 (hb) £32.00
Practical Philosophy (Book Reviews) July 2001 Volume 4.2
Reviewed by: Trevor Curnow
While naturally acknowledging the enormous erudition of Practical Philosophy readers, I nonetheless suspect that the name of Antiphon is rarely on their lips. However, a perusal of The Older Sophists reveals that he might reasonably be recognised as the first philosophical counsellor. It is said that he set up a private practice in Corinth at which he offered to alleviate the suffering of all those who came to him. Unfortunately, business was poor, so he turned his hand to public speaking instead. The case of Antiphon raises issues that affect philosophical counselling to this day. His gift appears to have largely been a rhetorical one; he did not so much solve problems as attempt to persuade people that the problems did not really exist. If faced with a choice between making a client happy and helping a client discover the truth, he would, it seems, unhesitatingly choose the former. (Such a choice may also be a familiar one to contemporary philosophical practitioners.)
It is this idea that the sophists had (at best) a cavalier attitude towards the truth that has plagued their reputation up to the modern day, aided by a great deal of spin on the part of Plato. Their names almost serve as a roll-call of Socrates’s protagonists in his dialogues: Protagoras, Gorgias, Critias, Thrasymachus and Hippias all feature here. Plato displayed the traditional hostility of inherited wealth towards those who had actually managed to earn it, and his prejudices have been extremely influential in the subsequent history of western philosophy. It is perhaps only amongst historians of education that the sophists have managed to achieve anything like a good press. However, it was not merely snobbery that led Plato to despise them. Philosophically, his absolutism found their (general but not universal) relativism difficult to stomach. Protagoras, perhaps the greatest among them, famously declared (p. 4) that: ‘Of all things the measure is man, of things that are, that they are, and of things that are not, that they are not.’
One of the problems with the sophists (as was later to happen with the ‘heretics’) is that they are best known through the writings of their enemies. This means that what has survived is fragmentary, and generally presented in the worst possible light. (There are honourable exceptions: both Diogenes Laertius and Philostratus sought to give them a fair hearing.) One of the merits of The Older Sophists is that, so far as is practicable, it allows the sophists to speak for themselves. Unfortunately, in most cases they can now speak only in isolated sentences or passages that fail to give full effect to the variety and coherence of their thought.
This book, a welcome reprint of a 1972 work, will primarily be of interest to students of ancient philosophy. For them it contains much material not easily (or as cheaply) available elsewhere. However, it may also be recommended reading for at least two other constituencies. First, to those who read Plato, in order to provide the basis for a more balanced judgement of those whom he excoriates. Secondly, to contemporary philosophy practitioners to whom such as Roger Scruton have sought to apply, in a pejorative way, the label of ‘sophist’.
Finally, for those who might find the title of this book puzzling, it may be helpful to know that the label of ‘older sophists’ is usually applied to those who practised primarily in the fifth century BC. In this way they are distinguished from the ‘second’ or ‘new’ sophistic movement of the second and third centuries AD.
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