The sophist and the philosopher

Abstract

The question of what the sophist is Chapter 1 has suggested that the basic problem of the Sophist , taken as a whole, is to define what the sophist is, and has examined the structure of the dialogue to get rid of one great obstacle to interpretation. Next, we must ask why the question about the sophist matters for philosophy. What did the question ‘What is a sophist?’ mean to Plato, and what does it mean to us? In Plato's day, the influence of the professional intellectuals or teachers called ‘sophists’ was so great on his society that it seems reasonable for Plato to examine the nature of the sophists. We modern readers, on the other hand, might think that this question is merely of historical importance, since the ‘sophists’ are historical figures that no longer exist. We tend, furthermore, to imagine that, even if the historical situation of his day forced Plato to examine the sophists, he could never have taken such a trivial issue as criticism of the sophists seriously, or at any rate more seriously than many other important philosophical issues. To this view, I respond in the following way. What Plato saw in the essence of the sophists is not so much a historical problem only for his time as a philosophical problem which is of great significance for establishing philosophy itself. Since the sophist is without doubt a historical figure for us, we must first examine the meaning of the ‘sophist’ in the historical context.