John Dillon (1)

I have to say that I did find this book interesting. I wasn't certain that it was going to keep me engaged, but it did.

Having Platonist sympathies, I have had a tendency to see the Sophists as hacks and con men. But reading this has at least helped in appreciating the ways they utilized language. Also, they did lay bare the ambiguities of language in some cases--even if one recognizes how ridiculous some of their semantical arguments really are. Plato gets this across to some degree in his dialogues that portray the sophists, but it is indeed often ironical there. Seneca noted a sophistical argument (originally attributed to Eubulides and not included in this book) that went something like this: "That which you have not lost, you have. You have not lost horns. Therefore, you have horns." These kinds of language conundrums are pretty silly on the surface, but if they help one to recognize the ambiguities of language, they may be of some utility. It was this kind of language trickery that the Sophists were known for. Whether Euthydemus and Dionysodorus took seriously their suppositional false dichotomy that one either knows nothing or knows everything is not entirely clear, but one can at least appreciate their demonstration of conundrums that occasionally accompany language when it comes to sense and context. They can be given credit for that at least. Although, one must admit that the Sophists often made money off of simple word chicanery.

Along with the above, the Sophists were the earliest Western thinkers that recognized the power of language in and upon society. Language really is capable of incredible influence when it is formulated and constructed in particular ways. The Sophists should be appreciated for being among the first to recognize this and the first to teach wordcraft. We take this for granted in this day in age, where advertisers and politicians have been manipulating people with constructed language for generations.

As I've stated before in other reviews, when it comes to the early Stoics, the Pre-Socratics and also the Sophists, our knowledge is rather paltry in terms of textual evidence because the original works mostly only exist in fragments (a notable exception is Gorgias) and in treatments by other writers. Be that as it may, when one sees all the fragments and references collected in one source as this book seeks to do, one can get a pretty good idea of what these thinkers were working with.

I give the book around three-and-a-half stars. It kept my attention and I found the accompanying commentary quite engaging.… (mehr)

The sophists -- public orators and "speech coaches" for hire -- were an extremely influential variable in the social and political life of ancient Athens. Many of their ideas frame the issues that exercised people like Socrates and Plato, and thus in these pages we encounter the kernels of many propositions that later grow into full-blown philosophical inquiries.

Dillon and Gergel's curation and reconstruction of the sophist's ideas is excellent, with the notable exception being the exclusion of Isocrates. (Dear Penguin Classics: how about a collected works of Isocrates to augment this book?)

In a world where the masses are sovereign, those who can influence the masses hold the power. This is another one of those "ancient" collections of writings that has a certain unmistakable resonance with the present.… (mehr)