Encomium of Hegel

Abstract

Sophists begins with the Lectures on the History of Philosophy presented by Hegel at Jena, Berlin, and Heidelberg between 1805 and 1830.1 But as many historians of rhetoric have pointed out, lectures on the pure science of sophistry only serve to reinforce the critical arguments against the Sophists advanced by Plato, Aristotle, and Isocrates. As George Kerferd observes in Sophistic Movement, Hegel does indeed manage to rein sert the Sophists into the history of philosophy, but only by portraying Gorgias and Protagoras as subjectivists, thus leading future scholars to proceed with only a partial modification of the profoundly hostile view of the Sophists handed down by the philosophical tradition (1981, 6). Simi larly, in his essay, The Misadventures of the Sophists, Steve Whitson shows how Hegel, in his efforts to totalize the history of philosophy into an encompassing system, subjugates the radical heterogeneity of sophistic thought by means of binarity-polarities and the dialectical machinery of thesis, antithesis, and synthesis: just perhaps, [Hegel] is playing the Sophists to his own advantage (1991, 199). And in Hegel's Reception of the Sophists, John Poulakos suggests that Hegel