Sophists vs. Socrates: A Philosophical Showdown in Ancient Greece

Sophists vs. Socrates: A Philosophical Comparison

Sophists

Main Features

• Itinerant teachers, often metics (non-Athenian Greeks).
• Offered encyclopedic knowledge.
• Charged fees for their teaching.

Thought and Philosophy

• Lack of interest in cosmology; strong interest in man and politics.
• Emphasized the importance of language, rhetoric, oratory, and eristic (argumentation).
• Arete (virtue) understood as social success.
• Often atheists or agnostics.
• Nomos: Law understood as a convention.
• Relativism (doctrine that human knowledge only seeks relationships, without ever reaching the absolute).
• Skepticism (mistrust or doubt regarding truth or effectiveness).
• Conventionalism (views or procedures based on misconceptions, taken as true for comfort or convenience).

Methodology

• Claimed to know everything and could develop compelling discourse on any issue.
• Primarily used monologue, speaking to large audiences.
• Speakers were experts in persuasion.
• Antilogical: ability to defend a thesis and its opposite, making the weaker argument appear stronger.
• Improvisation as a sign of rhetorical skill.

Objectives

• Achieving success in the assembly, political, and social spheres (arete).
• Attracting ambitious young men for financial gain.
• Focus on the specific case, not absolute truth.
• Teaching public speaking and persuasive argumentation.

Socrates

Main Features

• Did not claim to teach anything specific.
• Athenian citizen, involved in the defense of the city.
• Famously claimed, "I know nothing."
• Did not charge fees for his discussions.

Thought and Philosophy

• Primary interest: Ethics and Politics.
• Restoration of the value of language through universal definition and induction (deriving general principles from specific observations or experiences).
• Arete (virtue) equated with knowledge and wisdom.
• Believer (followed the official religion).
• Law reflects objective natural law (physis).
• Anti-relativist (believed in the possibility of absolute truth).
• Intellectualism (primacy of intellect over affect).

Methodology

• Recognized his ignorance: "I only know that I know nothing."
• Primarily used dialogue, engaging in one-on-one conversations.
• Philosophy as a collective search for truth.
• Maieutics (Socratic Method):
  • Phase 1: Ironic discovery of one's ignorance (aporia).
  • Phase 2: Socrates aids the interlocutor in discovering inherent knowledge, leading to absolute truth.

Objectives

• To convince others of the necessity of virtue, understood as wisdom.
• Openness to the world and critical inquiry.
• To serve as the conscience of society against the excesses of tyranny and democracy.
• Collective search for truth.