The sophistic movement / G.B. Kerferd.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Kerferd, G. B.

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Sophists (Greek philosophy).

Physical Description:

vii, 184 pages ; 23 cm

Place of Publication:

Cambridge ; New York : Cambridge University Press, 1981.

Summary:

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 philosophcial questions and decisively shifted the focus of philosophical attention from the cosmos to man.

Contents:

2 Towards a history of interpretations of the sophistic movement 4

3 The sophists as a social phenomenon 15

4 The meaning of the term sophist 24

5 The individual sophists 42

6 Dialectic, antilogic and eristic 59

7 The theory of language 68

8 The doctrine of logos in literature and rhetoric 78

9 Sophistic relativism 83

10 The nomos

physis controversy 111

11 Can virtue be taught? 131

12 The theory of society 139

13 Religion and the gods 163.

Notes:

Includes index.

Bibliography: pages 177-179.

ISBN:

0521239362

0521283574

OCLC:

7845300