School · 490 BCE–380 BCE
Sophistry
Sophists were itinerant teachers and intellectual competitors who made rhetoric, civic education, language, and the tension between nature and convention matters of sustained argument.
Shared questions
- Can rhetorical training and reflection on convention equip citizens to deliberate and act well?
Internal disagreements
- Whether persuasive expertise yields wisdom, and whether justice rests on nature, civic convention, or advantage.
Key texts
- On Not-Being — Gorgias' argument survives in two later summaries that do not agree with each other.
- Truth — Protagoras' book is known chiefly from its opening measure doctrine, quoted and attacked by Plato.