The Sophists in Plato's Dialogues , livre ebook

T HE S OPHISTS IN P LATO’S D IALOGUES
T HE S OPHISTS IN P LATO’S D IALOGUES
DAVID D. COREY
Published by State University of New York Press, Albany
© 2015 State University of New York
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Corey, David D.
The sophists in Plato’s Dialogues / David D. Corey.
pages cm
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-1-4384-5617-1 (hardcover. : alk. paper)
ISBN 978-1-4384-5619-5 (ebook)
1. Plato. Dialogues. 2. Sophists (Greek philosophy) I. Title. B395.C654 2015 184—dc23 2014022078
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
To my teachers of Greek Matthew Christ, Nate Greenberg, Jim Helm, and Tom VanNortwick And to Cecil Eubanks
CONTENTS
Acknowledgments
Abbreviations
1. Introduction
2. Defining the Platonic Sophists
3. The “Great Speech” in Plato’s Protagoras
4. Prodicus: Diplomat, Sophist, and Teacher of Socrates
5. The Sophist Hippias and the Problem of Polytropia
6. Brother Sophists: Euthydemus and Dionysodorus
7. Protagorean Sophistry in Plato’s Theaetetus
8. Plato’s Critique of the Sophists?
Appendix: A Primer on Hesiod’s Myth of Prometheus
Notes
Bibliography
Index
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
T his book was made possible in part by a generous research leave from Baylor University and through the expert assistance of numerous graduate students at Baylor, especially Matt Dinan, Patrick Cain, Josh King, and Corrine Peters. Several friends and colleagues commented on parts of the manuscript along the way. Rob Miner, Jake Howland, Mary Nichols, Catherine Zuckert, and Cary Nederman were especially helpful. Avi Mintz at the University of Tulsa deserves special thanks for reading the entire manuscript, offering detailed comments, and tirelessly pressing me to get this book in print.
Above all, I thank my wife, Elizabeth Corey, who has read the entire book multiple times and been an unwavering source of support and inspiration.
Earlier versions of Chapters 4 and 5 appeared respectively in History of Political Thought 29, no. 1 (2008): 1–26; and in Christopher A. Dustin and Denise Schaeffer, eds., Socratic Philosophy and Its Others (Lanham: Lexington Press, 2013), 91–114. They appear here with the kind permission of these presses.
David D. Corey
Waco, Texas
May 2014
ABBREVIATIONS
A BBREVIATED T ITLES FOR W ORKS OF P LATO Ap . Apology Charm . Charmides Crat . Cratylus Cri . Crito Euthyd . Euthydemus Euthphr . Euthyphro Gorg . Gorgias Hipp. Maj . Hippias Major Hipp. Min . Hippias Minor Lach . Laches Men . Meno Phd . Phaedo Phdr . Phaedrus Prm . Parmenides Prt . Protagoras Rep . Republic Symp . Symposium Soph . Sophist Tht . Theaetetus
O THER A BBREVIATIONS DK Diels and Kranz, Die Fragmente der Vorsokratiker DL Diogenes Laertius, Lives of Eminent Philosophers EN Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics Il. Homer, Iliad Mem. Xenophon, Memorabilia Nem. Pindar, Nemean Ode Od. Homer, Odyssey Th. Hesiod, Theogony TLG Thesaurus Linguae Graecae WD Hesiod, Works and Days
ONE
INTRODUCTION
T radition ascribes thirty-five dialogues to Plato, and more than half of them (21) touch on the theme of sophistry in one way or another. 1 In some dialogues, Plato casts the sophists as leading interlocutors of Socrates; in others they are mentioned for their intellectual tendencies and pedagogical practices. Frequently Plato exposes readers to hearsay about the sophists—sometimes friendly, sometimes hostile. At times he has Socrates defend them, but not always. And, constantly, he hints at the many ways in which Socrates seems both like and unlike the sophists. The richness and frequency of Plato’s handling of the sophists gives rise naturally to certain questions: What was Plato’s purpose in presenting these controversial figures? What was his view of them? And how did he expect readers to understand their relationship to Socrates?
This book springs from the suspicion that such questions have not been adequately answered. The dominant and indeed almost universally held view is that Plato was the sophists’ implacable foe, that he presented them in his dialogues in order to discredit them, and that his campaign against them was motivated by a deep desire to separate what he regarded as the sham wisdom of the sophists from the genuine wisdom of his teacher, Socrates. 2 This view no doubt has its attractions, not least of which is that it captures something of a dramatic, almost epochal struggle for the soul of Athens and the integrity of philosophy in Plato’s handling of the sophists. But how well does it ultimately line up with evidence from the dialogues?
In his dialogue, The Sophist , Plato has a silent Socrates look on while a stranger from Elea investigates the nature of sophistry with a pupil, Theaetetus. The dialogue ends when, after prodigious effort, the interlocutors finally agree on a definition of sophistry. The definition is intensely negative, 3 but it is also tendentious—or so readers of this dialogue should understand. For it fails to accommodate the full range of sophistic traits that Theaetetus and the stranger had outlined over the dialogue’s labyrinthine course. Moreover, and just as importantly, around the midpoint of the dialogue, Theaetetus and the stranger hesitatingly agree that Socrates (or some group of figures indistinguishable from Socrates) should be classed among the sophists for attempting to educate the young by means of a purgative art of refutation (231a–c). One thus wonders: Why would Plato’s chief dialogue on the sophists (if the Sophist can be described that way) dismiss these figures on obviously tendentious grounds and, at the same time, allow Socrates to appear vexingly intermingled with them, if his purpose were indeed to distinguish Socrates and the sophists once and for all?
Plato’s handling of sophistry in the Meno raises similar questions. When Socrates there suggests to Anytus that people who want to learn virtue or excellence ( aretē ) might do well to consult the sophists, Anytus reacts with horror: the sophists are “plainly the ruin and corruption of those who associate with them!” 4 But Plato does not leave it there. He rather has Socrates interrogate Anytus: Is it really credible to suppose that a great sophist like Protagoras has been corrupting all of Greece for forty years while receiving pay and gratitude in the process? The question goes unanswered, so Socrates continues: “Has one of the sophists done you some injustice, Anytus? Or why are you so harsh toward them?” 5 Anytus responds notoriously that he has in fact never had any experience of the sophists at all. To which Socrates reasonably retorts that Anytus must be some kind of prophet; for how else could he know whether there is something good or bad in a matter of which he has no experience? Thus is Anytus revealed to be a thoughtless proponent of a mere prejudice against the sophists. But, again, why would Plato have Socrates stand up for the sophists in this way if his goal were to discredit them?
Or consider Plato’s fascinating presentation of the sophist, Prodicus. Though there is no dialogue called the Prodicus , this sophist is treated in more than a dozen different places in the Platonic corpus, once as a character in the Protagoras and often as the originator of certain useful ideas or skills that Socrates wants to consider. 6 In multiple dialogues, Socrates claims to have studied with Prodicus, and he frequently goes on to employ one of this sophist’s best known skills (an art of making careful distinctions, called diairesis ) in order to dispel intellectual confusion and expose fallacies. But why would Plato portray this sophist so sympathetically and indeed go so far as to stress his role as Socrates’ teacher if his purpose were to dissociate Socrates from the sophists and tarnish their reputation?
Further examples could easily be cited to suggest that Plato’s handling of the sophists is more varied and complex than frequently assumed. But rather than pile example on example, I set out a summary of the argument that emerges gradually over the chapters that follow. The argument of this book is that Plato did not cast the sophists merely to criticize them, much less to villainize them or attack them as the enemies of philosophy. 7 Rather he treated them with remarkable care as teachers engaged in an enterprise similar in many ways to that of Socrates. He used them, moreover, to illuminate what was most distinctive about Socratic philosophy while at the same time supplying readers with necessary propaedeutic experiences to begin to engage in it.
On a more particular level, my thesis involves three basic claims. First, I argue that Plato made crucial and sometimes fundamental distinctions among the various figures we today call sophists. Plato’s sophists were neither a school nor a movement. Specific figures differed from each other in manifest ways—in what they studied, how and what they taught, how they stood in relation to conventional civic norms and, most importantly, how they related to Socrates. Moreover the sophists, on Plato’s account, were categorically different from another important group of intellectuals, the “rhetoricians,” even though both groups taught rhetoric. 8 In Plato the sophists are defined with remarkable consistency as professional teachers of aretē (human excellence or virtue) while the rhetoricians made no claim to teach aretē and in fact tended to denounce its conventi