Sophistry
Fifth-century BC Greek teachers of rhetoric and argument who taught for a fee, and who first argued that law and custom are human conventions rather than natural facts.
The Sophists were professional teachers in fifth-century BC Greece who taught rhetoric, argument and success in public life for a fee. They were the first paid educators in the Greek world and the first to make human affairs, rather than nature, the center of philosophical attention.
What they taught
Athens had become a democracy in which political and legal outcomes turned on persuasion. The Sophists supplied the skill. Protagoras, Gorgias, Hippias and Prodicus traveled between cities teaching argument, language and civic excellence.
Two positions recur. Protagoras held that man is the measure of all things, which locates truth in the perceiver rather than in an independent world. Several Sophists distinguished nomos, convention, from physis, nature, and argued that laws and customs are human constructions rather than fixed features of reality. That distinction was genuinely radical and remains central to debates about justice and the social contract.
The quarrel with Socrates
Socrates argued with them constantly, and Plato's portrayal is why the name became an insult. The charges were that they took money, that they taught how to win rather than how to reach truth, and that they claimed to teach virtue without possessing it. The boast that they could make the weaker argument the stronger became the standing accusation.
Plato is a hostile witness, and almost everything the Sophists wrote is lost, so the case is argued largely from the prosecution's notes. Modern scholarship treats them more seriously: relativism about value, the conventional character of law, and the study of language were all put on the agenda by this group.
The word today
"Sophistry" now means argument designed to deceive. The historical record supports a narrower charge — that the school taught persuasion as a technique separable from the truth of what was being urged, which is the objection rhetoric has faced ever since.
Questions
Who were the Sophists?
Professional teachers in fifth-century BC Greece who taught rhetoric, argument and civic success for a fee. They shifted philosophical attention from nature to human affairs, language and politics.
What did Protagoras mean by 'man is the measure of all things'?
That truth is relative to the perceiver rather than fixed independently. How things appear to a person is how they are for that person, which makes standards of truth and value human rather than natural.
Why did 'sophistry' become an insult?
Largely through Plato's hostile portrayal. The Sophists were charged with teaching how to win arguments rather than find truth, and with taking payment for teaching virtue they did not demonstrably possess.