Stoic Six Pack 7 (Illustrated) E-Book

Various Artists

• Herausgeber: Enhanced Media Publishing
• Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2016

Beschreibung

“True knowledge exists in knowing that you know nothing.”
- Socrates.

Two centuries before the Stoics lived The Sophists, star philosophers who roamed Athens during the fifth century B.C. commanding large fees for speaking and private lessons. They offered practical education, speculation on the nature of the universe and knowledge in the art of life and politics. The most famous were Protagoras, Gorgias, Prodicus, Hippias, Thrasymachus, Callicles, Lycophron, Antiphon and Cratylus.

Stoic Six Pack 7 – The Sophists brings key primary and secondary sources together in one volume for a fully rounded understanding of this early, often misunderstood philosophical movement:

The Sophists by Henry Sidgwick
Dialogues Protagoras and Gorgias by Plato
Memoirs of Socrates by Xenophon
Stoic Self-control by William De Witt Hyde
The Sophists – Biographical Sketches by William Smith
Euthydemus by Plato

Includes Sophist image gallery.

Leseprobe

STOIC SIX PACK 7

THE SOPHISTS

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William De Witt Hyde

Plato

Henry Sidgwick

William Smith

Xenophon

Stoic Six Pack 7 - The Sophists

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The Sophists by Henry Sidgwick. First published in Lectures on the philosophy of Kant and other philosophical lectures & essays, 1905.

Protagoras by Plato. Translated by Benjamin Jowett. First published in Dialogues: containing The Apology of Socrates, Crito, Phaedo, and Protagoras; with introd by the translator, Benjamin Jowett, by Plato in 1899.

Euthydemus by Plato. Translated by Benjamin Jowett. First published in The dialogues of Plato by Plato in 1892.

Gorgias by Plato. Translated by Benjamin Jowett. First published in The dialogues of Plato by Plato in  1892.

Memoirs of Socrates by Xenophon. Translated by Henry Graham Dakyns. First published in The works of Xenophon by Xenophon; Dakyns, Henry Graham in 1890.

Stoic Self-control by William De Witt Hyde. First published in The Five Great Philosophies of Life by William De Witt Hyde, 1911. 

The Sophists – Biographical Sketches by William Smith. First published in A new classical dictionary of Greek and Roman biography, mythology and geography: partly based upon the Dictionary of Greek and Roman biography and mythology by William Smith in 1860.

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Stoic Six Pack 7 - The Sophists. Published by Enhanced Media, 2016.

Table of Contents

The Sophists

By Henry Sidgwick

Protagoras

Plato

Euthydemus

Plato

Gorgias

Plato

The Memoirs of Socrates

Xenophon

BOOK I

IIIIIIIVVVIVII

BOOK II

IIIIIIIVVVIVIIVIIIIXX

BOOK III

IIIIIIIVVVIVIIVIIIIXXXIXIIXIIIXIV

BOOK IV

IIIIIIIVVVIVIIVIII

Stoic Self-control

By William De Witt Hyde

The Sophists

Biographical Sketches by William Smith

Antiphon

Cratylus

Gorgias

Hippias

Prodicus

Protagoras

Thrasymachus

IMAGE GALLERY

The Sophists

By Henry Sidgwick

The old view of the Sophists was that they were a set of charlatans who appeared in Greece in the fifth century, and earned an ample livelihood by imposing on public credulity: professing to teach virtue, they really taught the art of fallacious discourse, and meanwhile propagated immoral practical doctrines. That, gravitating to Athens as the center of Greece, they were there met and overthrown by Socrates, who exposed the hollowness of their rhetoric, turned their quibbles inside out, and triumphantly defended sound ethical principles against their plausible pernicious sophistries. That they thus, after a brief success, fell into well-merited contempt, so that their name became a byword for succeeding generations.

Against this [historian George] Grote argues: (l) That the Sophists were not a sect but a profession: and that there is no ground for attributing to them any agreement as to doctrines. That, in fact, the word Sophist was applied in Plato's time in a more extensive sense than that in which he uses it: so as to include Socrates and his disciples, as well as Protagoras and his congeners. So that, as far as the term carried with it a certain invidious sense, this must be attributed to the vague dislike felt by people generally ignorant towards those who profess wisdom above the common: a dislike which would fall on Plato and the Philosophers as well as on the paid teachers whom he called Sophists: though no doubt the fact of taking pay would draw on the latter a double measure of the invidious sentiment. (2) That as regards the teaching of immoral doctrines, even Plato (whose statements we must take cum grano) does not bring this as a charge against the principal Sophists, Protagoras, Prodicus, Hippias, Gorgias: that it is a priori improbable that any public teachers should propound doctrines so offensive to the common sentiments of mankind: that, therefore, we can scarcely suppose that Thrasymachus so propounded the anti-social theory of justice attributed to him by Plato in the Republic; and that even if he did, we cannot infer from this anything as to the other Sophists.

It is on the first point that [Plato scholar] Mr. [Benjamin] Jowett joins issue, and to this I shall at present restrict myself. Mr. Jowett urges that though the meaning of the word Sophist has no doubt varied, and has been successively contracted and enlarged, yet that there is a specific bad sense in which any intelligent Athenian would have applied the term to certain contemporaries of Socrates, and not to Socrates himself, nor to Plato. Wherever the word is applied to these latter, "the application is made by an enemy of Socrates and Plato, or in a neutral sense." In support of this he points out that "Plato, Xenophon, Isocrates, Aristotle" all give a bad import to the word: and the Sophists are "regarded as a separate class in all of them."

Now, first, I should have thought that we might say of any term denoting a man's walk in life, and connoting doubtfully an invidious sentiment, that it is either applied in a neutral sense or by an enemy, i.e. with polemical intent. Even the slightest flavour of dislike is enough to make the man himself, and his friends, avoid such a word: as we see in the common use of the terms 'attorney' and 'solicitor.'

Therefore, that disciples of the martyred sage, and those who learnt from them, never called Socrates a Sophist is very certain. But that the Athenian public considered him as such, whether intelligently or not, is surely undeniable. Mr. Jowett says that Aristophanes may have identified Socrates with the Sophists "for the purposes of comedy." But the purposes of comedy are surely not served by satire that does not fall in with common conceptions. The Athenians looked on Socrates as the most popular and remarkable of the teachers to whom young men resorted with the avowed object of learning virtue or the art of conduct, and the more evident result of learning a dangerous dexterity in discourse; and as such they called him a Sophist. The differences between him and such men as Protagoras would appear to them less important than the resemblances.

The charges brought against him by his accusers express just the general grounds of suspicion felt against both alike. "Whether a man corrupted youth rhetorically or dialectically, whether he made the worse case appear the better by Declamation or Disputation, would seem to them quite a secondary matter. That this view involved a profound misapprehension, I do not of course deny: but all evidence seems to me to show that the misapprehension was widespread and permanent. More than half a century afterwards, Aeschines (who can scarcely be regarded as 'an enemy'), when pleading for another example of salutary severity, reminds the Athenians how they had put to death the Sophist Socrates.

Again, Xenophon tells us that when the Thirty Tyrants wished to silence Socrates, they ordained that no one was to teach sophistry. Xenophon says, of course, that they did it to bring him into disfavour with the multitude: but the whole proceeding implies that this was the popular view of his function.

Mr. Jowett, however, appeals to the evidence of Isocrates, who clearly, he says, regarded the Sophists as a separate class, and at the same time used the term in a bad sense. And other writers on the same side have laid much stress on the testimony of Isocrates, as standing outside the Socratic tradition, and so free from any suspicion that may be raised as to the impartiality of Plato or Aristotle.