Euthydemus is included neither in Die Fragmente der Vorsokratiker by Diels–Kranz nor in Sofisti. Testimonianze e frammenti by Untersteiner nor in Early Greek Philosophy by Laks and Most. Likewise, the great twentieth century works on the Sophists do not give space to him, at best mentioning him briefly. Yet Euthydemus is the author of a fragment, which was quoted by Plato in his Cratylus, and on which again there is no modern study. This paper sets out to study this (...) fragment in depth, to review and discuss the various translations, both existing and possible, to study the context of Plato’s quotation, to clarify the exact meaning and the theoretical scope of this important fragment, and lastly to place Euthydemus in the Protagorean tradition, of which he is a notable product. (shrink)

The many difficulties the book contains are not due to its translator; Miss Freeman's well-marshalled English seldom leaves us in search of the intended sense. They are due rather to the complex character of the author's mind and to the exigencies of the thesis he is defending. One encounters flights of imagination in which lyrical transports alternate or combine with bold dialectical constructions offered as sober interpretations, and multiple quotations from ancient thinkers and modern critics, confusingly blended with our author's (...) own comments. Signor Untersteiner displays an ability like that of the anatomist Cuvier, and can reassemble the entire structure of a lost sophistic writing from a single bone. He exhumes from the works of many other writers--Thucydides, Plato, Theophrastus, Demosthenes, Sextus Empiricus, Cicero--major conceptions, chapters, or whole treatises, mistakenly incorporated there by later editors, or borrowed without acknowledgment; these and sundry anonymous writings on relevant themes he confidently assigns to this or that beneficiary among the sophists. As the inevitable consequence of this process other thinkers, notably Socrates and Plato, are sadly diminished. Socrates becomes, indeed, almost a superfluity, in whose absence the history of Greek thought would have remained unimpaired. Plato's works serve as happy hunting-grounds for supposed incorporations of sophistic insights; for the rest, he is shown as stone-and-gravel blind to the merits of these rival thinkers. Now, some discounting of Plato's satirical portrayal of the sophists may be admitted as legitimate and necessary. Untersteiner, however, has so far exceeded his allowance here as to reach the counter-absurdity, of which his interpretation of Thrasymachus in the ne plus ultra: to a proper reading, we are told, Thrasymachus is far from being a cynical denier of the claims of moral obligation. On the contrary, he is a broken-hearted idealist, and in calling justice "the advantage of the stronger" he is offering not his own conception of justice but, out of his bitter disillusion, describing what men in their tragic folly have made of that noble virtue. (shrink)

Historians of rhetoric refer to two Sophistics, one in the 5th century B.C. and another c. 2nd century A.D. Besides these two, there is a 3rd Sophistic, but it is not necessarily sequential. (The 3rd is “counter” to counting sequentially.) Whereas the representative Sophists of the 1st Sophistic is Protagoras, and the second, Aeschines, the representative sophists of the 3rd are Gorgias (as proto-Third) and Friedrich Nietzsche, Jean-François Lyotard, Michel Foucault, Jacques Lacan, and Paul de Man.To distinguish between and among (...) Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle, and then Protagoras, Gorgias, and Lacan, the author determines how far each of these personages can “count.” The model of counting, used semiotically across the topoi of “possible/impossible,” is that of the people of New Guinea: “one thing, two things, many things.” It is determined (generally) that the philosophers, including Aristotle, count to “one”; the Sophists to “two”; and Gorgias, Lacan, and Lyotard, et al. count to “many things,” thereby breaking up a monism or binarism. The ancient philosophers employ a substratum of probability to hold together the contraries of “possible/impossible”; the Sophists employ anti/logic, which keeps the contraries/antitheses separate and therefore without synthesis, but which eventually threatens the integrity of the substratum, or the law of non-contradiction; and Gorgias, Lacan, Lyotard et al. theorize about the “impossibility”/“Resistance” of the Logos (reason, logic, law, argumentation, history) to Theory/Totalization, because of the Gorgian Kairos and the Lacanian Real — both of which enter the Logos and break up the cycle of the antitheses and create “something new, irrational” (Untersteiner).This “breaking up” has a negative/positive influence on Protagoras's “man-measure doctrine,” which in turn has a similar influence on “the problem of the ethical subject.” The subject/agent not only no longer “knows” (by way of Logos) but also no longer “acts” (as independent agent); the subject becomes a function of Logos as determined by Kairos/Real; it moves from a hypotaxis/syntaxis of “one” and “two” to a radical parataxis/paralogy of “some more.”From the “Impossibility”/“tragedy” of knowledge, however, comes the “Possible,” or “Possibilisms,” which allows for the new (though divided) ethical subject to reclaim its position as “individual.” Such a reclamation of the subject, however, has a profound effect on argumentation, and especially the notion of “consensus.” What is wanted, then, in a Third Sophistic “ethical” — as opposed to a “political” — rhetoric is “dissensus” through radical parataxes and paralogies. (shrink)

En nuestra comunicación tratamos de las interpretaciones sobre uno de los fragmentos textuales comprendidos en el Sobre la Verdad, texto sofístico que pasa, en interpretaciones clásicas como las de Untersteiner o Guthrie, por ser pionero en nuestra tradición filosófico política en cuanto en él se expondrían tesis de claro carácter igualitarista. Si bien en las interpretaciones mencionadas se proclama que el texto en cuestión ataca los fundamentos teoréticos de los defensores de la esclavitud natural, no es menos cierto que (...) otras lecturas atenúan tal rasgo, hablando de un igualitarismo parcial y relativo únicamente a las diferencias culturales. Sin perder de vista el vínculo que ambas posiciones mantienen con la famosa Quaestio Antiphontea criticamos, en base a los textos aducidos por los propios intérpretes, la última posición mencionada, defendiendo que si bien los fragmentos y testimonios a nuestra disposición no nos permiten demostrar definitivamente la naturaleza de las tesis políticas de Antifonte, los mismos nos ofrecen la posibilidad de argüir algunas probabilidades a favor de la existencia de un igualitarismo de corte universal en el Sobre la Verdad. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Sophistical Wisdom:Politikê Aretê and “Logosophia”Christopher Lyle JohnstoneThe pursuit of Wisdom is at the center of the Western intellectual tradition, its attainment the literal ideal and end of all philosophical inquiry. It is recognized by various religions and belief systems as the key to a meaningful, fulfilling, happy life. Yet for all this, its nature remains unclear and the means of its attainment uncertain. Is it one thing, or are (...) there different kinds of wisdom? How is it acquired? Can it be taught or communicated to others? How, if at all, do speech and language figure in the attainment and dissemination of wisdom?The relationship between wisdom and utterance, reflected in the connection between philosophy and rhetoric, has been a focus of intellectual interest in the West since at least the time of Heraclitus of Ephesus (ca. 500 BCE): Parmenides, Empedocles, Protagoras, Gorgias, Socrates, Plato, Isocrates, Aristotle, Cicero, Quintilian, Augustine, Bacon, Vico—all have been concerned, either directly or indirectly, with the interrelation of speech or eloquence and what they view as the highest form of knowledge. Recent scholarship has pursued this relationship along several related lines of inquiry, albeit sometimes obliquely. Some investigators have examined the role of speech in the creation of all human knowledge.1 Others have concentrated more particularly on the role of rhetoric in the creation or exercise of wisdom.2 In an effort to illuminate the ancient foundations of these connections, several scholars have lately studied the link between language and thought in Greek philosophy and rhetoric.3My present interest centers on the linkages between wisdom and speech—between sophia and logos—in the teachings of those pivotal thinkers of the fifth-century Greek "Enlightenment," the Older Sophists. Although the doctrines of Heraclitus, Pythagoras, Empedocles, Archelaus, and the Atomists took up moral and political topics, presocratic thinkers generally had concentrated on the origins and mechanical workings of the physical world in which human beings live. As contemporaries of Protagoras and Gorgias, the Atomists—Leucippus and Democritus—are particularly noteworthy for having initiated inquiry into [End Page 265] the relationship between custom or law (nomos) and nature or objective reality (physis), which became a central concern for many of the Older Sophists.4 Such moral and political themes were taken up in earnest by the thinkers and teachers who resided in or were drawn to Athens in the fifth century BCE. Protagoras, Gorgias, Socrates, Antiphon, and others raised questions that were fundamentally political and moral: How should one live one's life? What are the values that should guide one's conduct? By what moral standards should our actions be judged, and how are these standards to be discovered? What legitimizes the laws that govern society? Are law and morality rooted in the nature of things, or are they merely matters of custom and convention? Such questions mark a shift in intellectual inquiry away from the sorts of naturalistic, metaphysical, and ontological problems that preoccupied presocratic thinkers and toward a primary concern with matters of praxis, politics, and morality.My aims in this essay are, first, to illuminate the conceptions of wisdom that can be reconstructed from our evidence for the teachings of the Older Sophists, and then to discern the role of speech in the attainment and exercise of this wisdom. The past half-century or so has witnessed a growing interest in the Sophists of fifth-century Athens. This interest is particularly noteworthy because it involves a determination to consider the Sophists on their own terms rather than through Plato's eyes, as had been customary in most nineteenth- and early twentieth-century sophistical studies. Though an early precedent was set by Grote's (1846) effort to challenge the Platonist bias in historical treatments of the Sophists, it was such scholars as Untersteiner (1949, 1954), Cornford (1950), Kerferd (1950, 1981), and Guthrie (1968, 1971) who inspired more recent revisionist histories of sophistical ideas.5 More recent studies have sought to illuminate the philosophical foundations of such ideas and their implications for the theory and practice of rhetoric. J. Poulakos (1983a, 1983b, 1984, 1990, 1995), Schiappa (1990, 1991, 1995, 1996, 1997, 1999), de Romilly (1992), Consigny (2001), McComisky (2002), Gagarin (2002... (shrink)

At any time, basic assumptions about language have a direct effect on the writing of history. The structure of language is related to the structure of knowledge and thus to the definition of historical reality, while linguistic competence gives insights into the relation of ideas and action. Within the framework of these ideas, and drawing on recent work in linguistic theory, including that of the French structuralists. Professor Struever studies the major shift in attitudes toward language and history which the (...) Renaissance represents. One of the essential innovations of Renaissance Humanism is the substitution of rhetoric for dialectic as the dominant language discipline; rhetoric gives the Humanists their cohesion as a lay intellectual elite, as well as the force and direction of their thought. The author accepts the current trend in classical studies, the rehabilitation of the Sophists which finds its source in Nietzsche and includes the work of Rostagni, Untersteiner, and Buccellato, to reinstate rhetoric as the historical vehicle of Sophistic insight. Originally published in 1970. The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These paperback editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905. (shrink)

A Fragment of ancient philosophy is like a code message which it is the task of the scholar to decipher. The cryptogram has come down to us, but not the key. In case this beginning should be thought obvious by anyone, let me say at once that I do not believe a word of it, though I believe that the attitude it epitomizes is by no means uncommon and is part of the explanation of a tendency to mishandle philosophical fragments. (...) The attitude is to be found, for example, in some things M. Untersteiner has said in his recently translated book on the Sophists1 about the meaning of the well-known statement of Protagoras. (shrink)

A Fragment of ancient philosophy is like a code message which it is the task of the scholar to decipher. The cryptogram has come down to us, but not the key. In case this beginning should be thought obvious by anyone, let me say at once that I do not believe a word of it, though I believe that the attitude it epitomizes is by no means uncommon and is part of the explanation of a tendency to mishandle philosophical fragments. (...) The attitude is to be found, for example, in some things M. Untersteiner has said in his recently translated book on the Sophists1 about the meaning of the well-known statement of Protagoras. (shrink)

The excuse for publishing a new anthology of texts in ancient philosophy is that the effort is not a duplication of previous attempts, either in terms of the texts offered or the interpretations tendered. It is impossible to meet the first criterion for the pre-Socratics, since there is a concise and relatively agreed upon canon of material. What then of the interpretations offered in this volume? They are scant, unimaginative, and, in some cases, misleading. This is especially true in the (...) case of the sophists. Thus, Callicles' long speech from the Gorgias is quoted as representative of sophistical doctrine on the antithesis between nature and convention. The practice of quoting Plato on the sophists is hazardous at best. Why not, instead, print and analyze those intriguing fragments one and two of Antiphon's Περὶ ληθείας? Or if Plato is to be trusted in regard to the sophists, why not quote Protagoras' remarks in the Platonic dialogue of that same name? Or the excursion in the Theaetetus? These selections would present a much more complete picture of Protagoras' doctrines than the seven lines from the doxographical tradition that the editors supply. In addition, there appears to be little logic in the bibliographies. The only secondary source suggested for the sophists is Untersteiner's book. Havelock's The Liberal Temper in Greek Politics is equally controversial, but certainly more reliable. Or if J. H. Loenen's "Was Anaximander an Evolutionist?" could be dredged up from Mnemosyne, surely some material from the other journals could have been found for the sophists. After the pre-Socratics, the book offers about eighty-five pages of selections from Plato, one hundred pages from Aristotle, twenty-five pages from Hellenistic stoicism, Epicureanism, and skepticism and a concluding twenty pages from Plotinus. A novel and quite useful feature of the book is a thematic table which topically indexes the texts according to the editors' conception of the main branches of philosophy.--E. A. R. (shrink)