ভূমিকা

Shiavault - a Vault of Shia Islamic Books A Short History of Ethics: a History of Moral Philosophy From the Homeric Age To the Twentieth Century CHAPTER 3: THE SOPHISTS AND SOCRATES THE PECULIAR cultural relativism of the sophists is an attempt to meet the simultaneous demands of two tasks: that of assigning a coherent set of meanings to the evaluative vocabulary, and that of explaining how to live well-that is, effectively-in a city-state.

They begin from a situation in which the prerequisite of a successful social career is success in the public forums of the city, the assembly, and the law courts. To succeed in that milieu it was necessary to convince and to please. But what would convince and please in one place might fail to convince and please in another. Individual sophists, men such as Protagoras and Gorgias and their disciples, all had their own doctrines and theories in the face of this problem.

But we can pick out a general amalgam of sophistic theory, which is what Plato objected to and Socrates earlier criticized and rivaled. This amalgam would run as follows: The ἀρετή of a man is his functioning well as a man. To function well as a man in the city-state is to be a successful citizen. To be a successful citizen is to impress in the assembly and the law courts. To succeed there it is necessary to conform to the prevailing conventions as to what is just, right, and fitting.

Each state has its conventions on these matters. What one must do therefore is to study prevailing usages and learn to adapt oneself to them, so as to mold one’s hearers successfully. This is the τέχνη, the craft, the skill, which it is at once the business and the virtue of a sophist to teach. It is a presupposition of this teaching that there is no criterion of virtue as such, apart from success, and no criterion of justice as such, apart from the dominant practice of each particular city.

In the Theatetus Plato outlines a doctrine which he puts into the mouth of the sophist Protagoras. This links moral relativism with a general relativism in the theory of knowledge. Protagoras’ most famous saying was that “Man is the measure of all things; of the things which are, that they are, and of the things which are not, that they are not.” Plato interprets this as referring to sense perception, and as meaning that as things seem to be to an individual percipient, so they are (to him).