This book offers an introduction to the Sophists of fifth-century Athens and a new overall interpretation of their thought. Since Plato first animadverted on their activities, the Sophists have commonly been presented as little better than intellectual mountebanks - a picture which Professor Kerferd forcefully challenges here. Interpreting the evidence with care, he shows them to have been part of an exciting and historically crucial intellectual movement. At the centre of their teaching was a form of relativism, most famously expressed (...) by Protagoras as 'Man is the measure of all things', and which they developed in a wide range of views - on knowledge and argument, virtue, government, society, and the gods. On all these subjects the Sophists did far more than simply provoke Plato to thought. Their contributions were substantial and serious; they inaugurated the debate on many central philosophical questions and decisively shifted the focus of philosophical attention from the cosmos to man. (shrink)

CONTRASTING PREJUDICES TRUTH AND FALSEHOOD How can one say something false? How can one even think such a thing? Since, for example, all men are mortal, ...

En el presente artículo intentaremos mostrar que en el Eutidemo Platón desarrolla una crítica contra la dialéctica de los filósofos megáricos que tiene por objetivo señalar los aspectos problemáticos de la teoría del lenguaje que fundamenta el procedimiento erístico. Específicamente, Platón muestra que la falta de un criterio de verdad los lleva a comprometerse con enunciados que socavan los fundamentos de la dialéctica. In this paper we shall try to show that in the Euthydemus Plato develops a critic of the (...) Megarian's dialectic, which aims to point out the problematical sides of language theory underpinning the eristic procedure. Specifically, Plato shows that the lack of a criterion of truth leads them to commit to statements that undermine the foundations of dialectic. (shrink)

... all probability, Plato's own statement; made indeed to be read by friends in Syracuse in explanation of the role he had played ...