The Sophists
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For a fee, they promised to make you the most persuasive person in the room. Was that education — or a con?
The Presocratics gazed outward, at the cosmos: What is everything made of? Around the middle of the fifth century BCE a new kind of thinker turned the gaze inward and downward — toward human beings, their speech, their laws, their values. These were the Sophists (sophistēs = “expert,” “wise man”), and they mark philosophy’s first “human turn.”
Sophists were itinerant, professional, paid teachers. They travelled the Greek world, gave dazzling public displays, and charged high fees to teach aretē (excellence, virtue) — above all the practical excellence of the citizen: how to manage a household, speak in the Assembly, and win in court. Their master craft was rhētorikē — rhetoric, the art of persuasion.
The most famous Sophist was Protagoras of Abdera. His single most quoted sentence is the founding slogan of relativism: “Of all things the measure is man — of the things that are, that they are; of the things that are not, that they are not” (Protagoras, fr. 1, preserved by Plato in the Theaetetus 152a). Truth is not one fixed thing “out there”; it is indexed to the perceiver.
Extended from perception to values, this becomes ethical relativism: justice, piety, and beauty are not carved into the universe but hold for a community or for a person. What is just in Sparta may be unjust in Athens, and neither is simply, absolutely right. Protagoras also flaunted his agnosticism about the gods: “Concerning the gods, I cannot know whether they exist or not, nor what they are like” (fr. 4) — a line that reportedly got his books burned.
What does Protagoras' 'man is the measure of all things' primarily assert?
The other giant was Gorgias of Leontini, a virtuoso of rhetoric who could, he boasted, argue any side of any case. In his showpiece On Not-Being (also called On Nature) he defends three shocking theses in sequence: (1) nothing exists; (2) even if something existed, it could not be known; (3) even if it could be known, it could not be communicated to another.
The Sophists opened one of the deepest debates in Greek thought: nomos versus physis. Nomos = law, custom, convention — what human beings have agreed to. Physis = nature — what holds independently of anyone’s agreement. The question: are our moral and legal rules grounded in nature (and so binding on everyone), or are they mere convention (and so arbitrary, changeable, even a fraud)?
In the nomos–physis debate, which claim best captures the position of a radical Sophist like Callicles?
The Sophists’ reputation has always been double. They were serious pioneers: the first professional educators, first theorists of language and grammar, first to make human society and morality a subject of rigorous argument. Yet they charged money for wisdom (which struck many Greeks as vulgar), they taught how to win rather than how to find truth, and their relativism looked to critics like a solvent for all fixed values.