The Sophistic Movement

The Sophistic Movement PDF

Author: G. B. Kerferd

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Published: 1981-09-03

Total Pages: 198

ISBN-13: 9780521283571

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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.

The Second Sophistic

The Second Sophistic PDF

Author: Graham Anderson

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2005-07-25

Total Pages: 318

ISBN-13: 1134856849

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Presenting the sophists' role as civic celebrities side-by-side with their roles as transmitters of Hellenic culture, Anderson produces a valuable and lucid account of the Second Sophistic.

The Oxford Handbook of the Second Sophistic

The Oxford Handbook of the Second Sophistic PDF

Author: Daniel S. Richter

Publisher: Oxford University Press

Published: 2017

Total Pages: 777

ISBN-13: 0199837473

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The study of the Second Sophistic is a relative newcomer to the Anglophone field of classics, and much of what characterizes it temporally and culturally remains a matter of legitimate contestation. This Handbook offers a diversity of scholarly voices that attempt to define the state of this developing field. Included are chapters that offer practical guidance on the wide range of valuable textual materials that survive, many of which are useful or even core to inquiries of particularly current interest (e.g., gender studies, cultural history of the body, sociology of literary culture, history of education and intellectualism, history of religion, political theory, history of medicine, cultural linguistics, intersection of the classical traditions and early Christianity).

The Social World of Intellectuals in the Roman Empire

The Social World of Intellectuals in the Roman Empire PDF

Author: Kendra Eshleman

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Published: 2012-11-08

Total Pages:

ISBN-13: 1139851837

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This book examines the role of social networks in the formation of identity among sophists, philosophers and Christians in the early Roman Empire. Membership in each category was established and evaluated socially as well as discursively. From clashes over admission to classrooms and communion to construction of the group's history, integration into the social fabric of the community served as both an index of identity and a medium through which contests over status and authority were conducted. The juxtaposition of patterns of belonging in Second Sophistic and early Christian circles reveals a shared repertoire of technologies of self-definition, authorization and institutionalization and shows how each group manipulated and adapted those strategies to its own needs. This approach provides a more rounded view of the Second Sophistic and places the early Christian formation of 'orthodoxy' in a fresh context.

Protagoras

Protagoras PDF

Author: Daniel Silvermintz

Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing

Published: 2015-12-17

Total Pages: 108

ISBN-13: 1472512626

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The presocratic philosopher Protagoras of Abdera (490–420 BC), founder of the sophistic movement, was famously agnostic towards the existence and nature of the gods, and was the proponent of the doctrine that 'man is the measure of all things'. Still relevant to contemporary society, Protagoras is in many ways a precursor of the postmodern movement. In the brief fragments that survive, he lays the foundation for relativism, agnosticism, the significance of rhetoric, a pedagogy for critical thinking and a conception of the human being as a social construction. This accessible introductory survey by Daniel Silvermintz covers Protagoras' life, ideas and lasting legacy. Each chapter interprets one of the surviving fragments and draws connections with related ideas forwarded by other sophists, showing its relevance to an area of knowledge: epistemology, ethics, education and sociology.

Protagoras of Abdera

Protagoras of Abdera PDF

Author: Johannes M. van Ophuijsen

Publisher: BRILL

Published: 2013-06-20

Total Pages: 344

ISBN-13: 9004251243

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Protagoras of Abdera, Socrates’ older contemporary, is regarded as one of the most prominent representatives of the so-called sophistic movement. Instead of simply accepting the biased reports given by Plato and Aristotle about this sophist, the contributors to this volume review the complicated doxographical situation and make a case for Protagoras as a philosopher in his own right. Two major themes of this volume are Protagoras’ relativism and his case for a moral and political ideal, both of which are contrasted with the metaphysical idealism of his future opponents in the Academy and the mundane conventionalism typically associated with the sophists. It turns out that rather than a parasitic force of intellectual subversion, Protagoras may have been a prolific and original thinker aiming at a coherent and comprehensive view of man’s place in the world.

Antiphon the Sophist

Antiphon the Sophist PDF

Author: Antiphon (of Athens.)

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Published: 2002-08-29

Total Pages: 508

ISBN-13: 9780521651615

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