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The Greek Sophists : Teachers of Virtue David Dwyer Corey Louisiana State University and Agricultural and Mechanical College

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The Greek Sophists : Teachers of Virtue David Dwyer Corey Louisiana State University and Agricultural and Mechanical College Louisiana State University LSU Digital Commons LSU Doctoral Dissertations Graduate School 2002 The Greek sophists : teachers of virtue David Dwyer Corey Louisiana State University and Agricultural and Mechanical College Follow this and additional works at: https://digitalcommons.lsu.edu/gradschool_dissertations Part of the Political Science Commons Recommended Citation Corey, David Dwyer, "The Greek sophists : teachers of virtue" (2002). LSU Doctoral Dissertations. 270. https://digitalcommons.lsu.edu/gradschool_dissertations/270 This Dissertation is brought to you for free and open access by the Graduate School at LSU Digital Commons. It has been accepted for inclusion in LSU Doctoral Dissertations by an authorized graduate school editor of LSU Digital Commons. For more information, please [email protected]. THE GREEK SOPHISTS: TEACHERS OF VIRTUE A Dissertation Submitted to the Graduate Faculty of the Louisiana State University and Agricultural and Mechanical College in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in The Department of Political Science by David Dwyer Corey B.A., Oberlin College, 1992 B.Mus., Oberlin Conservatory, 1992 M.A., Louisiana State University, 1999 May, 2002 ACKNOWLEDGMENTS This dissertation has had many sources of inspiration and support, and I have long looked forward to the opportunity to thank those who have been involved. Professor William F. Campbell and his wife, Helen (my father- and mother-in-law) accepted me into their family as a wayward stockbroker and through intellectual stimulation, love and ample quantities of food and wine produced a budding academic. Judy Petrie at First Presbyterian Church, Baton Rouge, encouraged me to go to graduate school and supported me generously through my first couple of years. My parents, Vernon and Joyce Corey supported me through five years at Oberlin College and have represented the finest example of intellectual curiosity and love of wisdom an aspiring intellectual could hope for. The leisure required for graduate study and for the composition of the dissertation was made possible by an LSU teaching assistantship in the department of political science, a Weaver Fellowship from the Intercollegiate Studies Institute, an LSU dissertation fellowship, and a Deutscher Akademischer Austauschdienst Fellowship (DAAD) for Research in Germany. Several scholars took me under their wing and guided me along the way. Cecil Eubanks has been a model professor, mentor and friend. His seemingly inexhaustible time for conversation (a quality all too rare in the academy today) proved invaluable to me in trying to understand myself and the discipline of political science. I found, during our many rich conversations, that Professor Eubanks’s interests were my interests too. And if it were not for his love of ancient culture, his insistence that I keep up my Greek and his interest in my dissertation topic in general, I would never have written the dissertation that I did. Other members of my committee—Ellis Sandoz, Jim Stoner, Bill Clark and Mary Sirridge—deserve thanks for their helpful comments and suggestions; Mary Sirridge, in particular, for correcting ii numerous errors in earlier versions of the manuscript. Scott Segrest at LSU, Robert Bartlett at Emory and Sue Collins at the University of Houston read parts of my manuscript and provided helpful feedback and insightful questions. John Noel at Rice University helped with translations from eighteenth-century French. I owe a special debt to two individuals in particular: Professor Bob McMahon in the English department at LSU and his wife Kim Orr. The almost-weekly dinners we shared and the stimulating conversations that went with them were a major part of my graduate education. My greatest debt of all is owed to my wife Elizabeth, who not only brought stability and order to the often-chaotic life of a graduate student but also managed, at the same time, to share in my intellectual journey. Without her support and encouragement, her penetrating insights, her editorial assistance, and especially her patience, this dissertation would not have been possible. iii PREFACE This dissertation began as a study not of the Greek sophists but of the varieties of political skepticism from the ancients to the moderns. Only the first chapter was to examine the sophists—and this, only to show that they were “proto-skeptics.” But, as often happens when projects are too ambitious and hypotheses are set out in advance, my work, once under way, began to take on a life all its own. In particular, the more I explored the surviving fragments of the sophists’ thought, the more I came to realize that these popular teachers of aretê, of “virtue” in a broad and practical sense of the word, could not be simply characterized as skeptics. Indeed, more often than not, the sophists appeared to be propounding a moral outlook that could only be characterized as conventional and stubbornly unquestioning (hence Plato, Republic 492a-493c). As it turns out, what originated as an effort to demonstrate the skepticism of the sophists became an effort to understand the sophists qua sophists. And, as the following chapters will show, this approach has produced rather startling results. Studies of the sophists are abundant. In fact, in nearly every discipline of the humanities, one finds a “re-reading” of the sophists underway.1 Where once the sophists were regarded as sinister figures, black sheep of the ancient world, they are now touted as significant contributors to philosophy, to rhetoric, to educational theory and to political thought. If it is a general philosophical survey one seeks, there is Kerferd’s very readable Sophistic Movement or the third volume of Guthrie’s History of Greek Philosophy, now published separately as The Sophists.2 If one is interested in specific figures, there are detailed monographs on Protagoras, Hippias, and 1 The language is Susan C. Jarratt’s, Rereading the Sophists: Classical Rhetoric Refigured (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1991). 2 G. B. Kerferd, The Sophistic Movement (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981); W. K. C. Guthrie, The Sophists (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1971). iv other major sophists. So why another study of the sophists? The answer lies precisely in the fact that these figures have too often been studied from within the strict confines of particular academic disciplines. They have been approached as philosophers, as rhetoricians, and so on; but they have rarely been approached as sophists in the full sense of that word. What exactly does it mean to be a sophist? This question has not to this day been adequately answered, and indeed, it is often studiously avoided. Why did the sophists seem so politically threatening to Aristophanes, so pedagogically impotent to Socrates, and so philosophically crude to Aristotle? And what is it about them, anyway, that so engages the modern imagination? What I offer in the chapters that follow is neither a defense of, nor an attack upon, the sophists; for it is not my view that these figures were exceptionally good or evil. What I offer is an examination of the evidence surrounding the particular sophists’ careers and an assessment of what is most characteristic and therefore historically significant about them. The principal claims that this dissertation puts forth are three in number: first, that the sophists have been generally misidentified by modern writers—i.e., that many of the figures we regard as sophists today were in fact not sophists at all; second, that the sophists shared (according to Plato) a common profession as teachers of aretê; and, third, that the dramatic conflict between the sophists and Socrates as portrayed in Plato’s dialogues, so far from being a conflict between good and evil, is in fact one between equally plausible and equally necessary moral dispositions. Indeed, as I argue below, the conflict is one that rages in the soul of every morally conscious individual; it can neither be avoided nor completely resolved. It is a conflict between the pursuit of the good life through action—which means, necessarily, suspending one’s philosophical doubts and assuming a knowledge of the “good”; and a pursuit of the good life through philosophy—which means necessarily suspending one’s actions in order to investigate their v goodness. These dispositions are not mutually exclusive in the course of a life: the sophists sometimes practice philosophical reflection just as Socrates sometimes performs decisive practical acts; but they exist in a constant state of tension, one with the other.3 For this reason, a study of the Greek sophists and their encounters with Socrates becomes at its best moments a study of ourselves, a study of the way we as individuals and communities balance the necessity for action with the pursuit of wisdom. 3 Hence, as Dana Villa observes, Socratic Citizenship (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2001), p. 4: “The moment thinking starts—the moment perplexity about the virtues sets in—the practical side of everyday life is suspended, at least temporarily.” vi TABLE OF CONTENTS ACKNOWLEDGMENTS ................................................................................................................................ii PREFACE....................................................................................................................................................iv TRANSLATIONS AND ABBREVIATIONS........................................................................................................viii
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