Primers › Philosophy

The Sophists and Socrates

The Presocratics asked what the world is made of. In Athens in the 400s BCE the questions turned toward people: what’s right, what’s worth knowing, and how to live. Two groups pushed that turn. The Sophists were paid teachers who could argue either side of anything. Socrates charged nothing, wrote nothing, and spent his life questioning people until they admitted they didn’t know what they were talking about. Athens executed him for it in 399 BCE [1].

This primer follows episode 3 of Philosophize This! [2] and checks it against the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, the same way the Presocratics primer does. Three of Socrates’ ideas get the most room:

1. The unexamined life is not worth living. Questioning your own beliefs is the point of being alive, not a hobby.
2. Right and wrong are real. They aren’t opinions that change from person to person or city to city, even if nobody has pinned them down yet.
3. Knowledge comes from thinking things through. You get it by questioning and testing ideas, not by being told.

A few terms come up throughout:

• Virtue translates the Greek aretē, which meant any kind of excellence that leads to success [3]. It doesn’t mean prudishness here. Socrates used it for the qualities that make someone a good person, like courage, reverence, and self-control [3].
• Reverence, also translated piety, means proper respect for the gods [3].
• Dialogue. Plato wrote philosophy as conversations, like scripts, and Socrates is the main speaker in most of them [1].
• The Apology is Plato’s version of the speech Socrates gave at his trial [3]. Despite the name, Socrates doesn’t apologize in it. It’s his defense.

Athens needed people who could argue

Athens was a democracy that settled a lot in court, and ordinary citizens had to argue their own cases. Speaking well also decided who got ahead in politics. The podcast points out that most people had no training for either, so there was money in teaching it [2].

The Sophists

The Sophists were traveling teachers who taught for a fee, in subjects from rhetoric (persuasive speaking) to mathematics [3]. Their name comes from sophia, wisdom [2]. People distrusted them for charging money and for teaching students to win whatever side they were on. The standard accusation was that they taught how to make “the weaker argument the stronger” [4], [3].

Gorgias shows the style. One of his surviving pieces defends Helen of Troy, the woman blamed for the Trojan War, partly as a display of how good his writing was and partly to show off how well he could argue a hard case [4]. In it he compares words to drugs: some heal and some kill, and speech can “bewitch the soul with evil persuasion” [2].

Protagoras: “man is the measure”

The most famous Sophist line comes from Protagoras:

Man is the measure of all things, of the things that are that they are and of the things that are not that they are not.

Our main source for what he meant is Plato’s dialogue Theaetetus, which reads it this way: things are for each person the way they seem to that person. If the wind feels cold to me and warm to you, then it’s cold for me and warm for you, and there’s no further fact about which of us is right [4]. This view is called relativism: truth is relative to whoever is judging.

The podcast takes Protagoras one step further, to morality. On that reading nothing is good or bad in itself, only good or bad according to a person or a society [2]. The podcast also treats relativism as the Sophists’ shared view [2]. The encyclopedia disagrees. Protagoras is the only Sophist the ancient sources call a relativist, and even for him it depends on how you interpret Plato’s account [4].

Relativism has an obvious problem. If every belief is true for whoever holds it, then “relativism is false” is true for the people who believe that. In the Theaetetus, Socrates pushes the claim until it applies to every judgment, including itself [4]. The podcast puts it more simply: if everyone is already right, nobody can be wiser than anybody else, so why pay a Sophist to teach you [2]?

Socrates

Socrates lived in Athens from 469 to 399 BCE [1]. The sources agree he was strikingly ugly, and he went around poor and barefoot, which made him stand out in a city that cared about looks and status [1], [2]. He talked with anyone who would talk back, rich or poor, citizen or visitor. He insisted he wasn’t a teacher and never took money for any of it [1].

Who was he really?

Socrates never wrote anything, so everything we know comes from other people, and they don’t agree. Scholars call this the Socratic problem. The encyclopedia names three primary sources [1]:

The podcast adds Aristotle as a fourth source, though it notes he was born after Socrates died [2]. The encyclopedia is blunt about the whole situation: “The ‘real’ Socrates we have not” [1]. Plato’s Apology, his version of Socrates’ speech at the trial, is usually thought to be the closest to the historical man [3], and most of what follows comes from it and Plato’s other early dialogues.

The oracle: knowing that you don’t know

According to Plato’s account of the trial, Socrates’ friend Chaerephon brought back an answer from the oracle of Apollo at Delphi, and Socrates took it as a mission [1]. The podcast tells it as the oracle naming Socrates the wisest man alive [2]. Socrates couldn’t believe it, so he went around questioning everyone with a reputation for wisdom. He found that they all thought they knew things they didn’t. He decided his only advantage was knowing that he didn’t know [2]:

I am likely to be wiser than he to this small extent, that I do not think I know what I do not know.

All three of his big ideas start from that admission.

1. The unexamined life is not worth living

At his trial Socrates said his life’s work was examining people’s lives, his own and everyone else’s, because “the unexamined life is not worth living for a human being” (Plato, Apology 38a) [1].

He meant something stronger than “reflection is good for you.” Socrates thought of virtue as the health of the soul, the way fitness is the health of the body. Doing wrong damages your soul, and since your soul matters more than your body, nothing deserves more care than virtue [3]. Examining your beliefs is how you take care of it. In the podcast’s words, he told the jury that discussing goodness every day and “examining both myself and others is really the very best thing a man can do” [2].

Philosophy also stopped being something for a few rich specialists. The podcast stresses that Socrates thought everyone should be doing it [2]. Someone who goes through life never asking why they believe what they believe is, by his standard, missing the point of being human.

2. Right and wrong are real

Socrates rejected the idea that right and wrong are just opinion. The podcast puts it as Socrates believing in moral absolutes, the same for everyone in every country and time [2]. The encyclopedia describes it through what he kept asking. “What is courage?” “What is reverence?” He assumed each of these was a real thing with one true answer [3].

He was strict about what counted as an answer. A good definition of reverence had to [3]:

1. fit every case of reverence, not just one kind or one example,
2. fit nothing that isn’t reverence, and
3. explain what makes reverent things reverent.

In Plato’s Euthyphro, a man on his way to court says reverence is “what all the gods love.” Socrates doesn’t accept it. Even if it’s true, it doesn’t say what makes something reverent, only something that happens to be true of it [3].

Socrates almost never found a definition he was happy with [3], and he never claimed to know the answers. He wasn’t saying “I know what’s right and you don’t.” His claim was that there is an answer, and that we should keep looking for it instead of deciding it’s whatever each person thinks. The podcast frames it as a challenge: how can you argue about what’s good if you don’t know what “good” means [2]?

He did hold one principle firmly, the bedrock of his ethics: it is never right to do wrong, even to someone who wronged you first [3]. That ruled out the traditional Greek idea that you should help your friends and harm your enemies.

3. Knowledge comes from thinking things through

Socrates didn’t lecture. He asked questions, and the way he did it is called the Socratic method. Scholars call its most common form the elenchus [3].

It works like this [3]:

1. Someone claims to know something, usually about a virtue.
2. Socrates asks questions, and the person has to answer with what they really believe.
3. They agree to a series of statements along the way.
4. Those statements turn out to contradict the original claim.
5. The person can’t defend their claim anymore. They have to drop it or try a better one.

The elenchus as a loop. Each pass throws out an answer that didn't hold up.

The podcast calls this method “inductive argument,” reasoning from examples to a general rule [2]. That’s partly right. Socrates sometimes backed up a step with a general rule drawn from examples, which is induction. The method as a whole works by finding contradictions, though, and usually ends with the other person stuck rather than with a new rule [3]. Socrates compared himself to a midwife who helps other people give birth to ideas instead of handing them his own [2], [1].

Knowing what’s right means doing it

Socrates tied knowledge and goodness together tightly. On his view, knowing what’s right can’t be overpowered by pleasure or passion, so no one does wrong willingly. People who do wrong don’t really know better [3]. The podcast quotes him: “There is only one good, knowledge, and one evil, ignorance” [2]. This is why examining your beliefs matters so much. If wrongdoing comes from ignorance, thinking things through is how you become good.

The obvious objection is the smoker who knows they should quit and doesn’t [2]. Philosophers call that weakness of will. The encyclopedia says Socrates wasn’t denying that people do wrong in the grip of desire. He was rejecting the usual explanation, that their knowledge got overpowered, and saying that anyone with real knowledge wouldn’t act that way. Scholars still argue about whether he really believed this or was setting a trap for Protagoras in the dialogue where it comes up [3].

The trial and death

In 399 BCE Socrates was charged with corrupting the young men of Athens and with introducing new gods instead of honoring the city’s [3], [1]. He had made a lot of enemies by embarrassing people in public, and Aristophanes’ Clouds had already painted him as a Sophist who mocked the gods [1], [2]. Athens had also just come through a war it lost, and a short, brutal rule by the Thirty Tyrants [2].

According to the podcast, he refused to beg or bring his family in to win the jury’s sympathy, and after being found guilty he proposed that his “punishment” be free meals for life, an honor usually given to Olympic winners [2]. The jury sentenced him to death. He told them nobody knows whether death is bad, so fearing it is just another case of thinking you know what you don’t [2]:

No one knows whether death may not be the greatest of all blessings for a man, yet men fear it as if they knew that it is the greatest of all evils.

Plato’s Crito is set in prison the day before the execution. Socrates could still have bribed his way out and left Athens. He refused, because escaping would mean doing wrong, and it’s never right to do wrong [3]. He drank hemlock, the poison Athens used for executions [1].

Socrates and the Sophists side by side

Athens lumped Socrates in with the Sophists, and the label helped convict him [2]. Both questioned traditional beliefs and both were formidable arguers, but they differed on everything that mattered to him [3], [2].

The podcast’s last point holds up whatever you make of the details. Socrates could almost certainly have argued his way out of the death sentence, and a Sophist would have [2]. He lost the argument on purpose rather than give up the way he lived.

References

Every source cited across the primers is collected on one page.