Hi. Hi, I'm Peter Adamson, and you're listening to the History of Philosophy podcast, brought to you

with the support of King's College London and the Levergium Trust. Today's episode, Making the Weaker

argument the stronger, the sophists. The word sophist is nowadays a term of abuse. If you call someone a sophist you're accusing them of using bad arguments, arguments which are deceptively plausible, but in fact totally bogus.

Worse still, sophistry is arguing badly on purpose, trying to pull the wool over people's eyes by weaving a web of confusing and misleading words.

How can this be? Given that the word sophist derives from the Greek word for wisdom, Sophia.

The word sophistes or sophist, originally meant something like a wise man.

So how did it come to have these fraudulent associations to the point that a softist is almost the reverse of a wise person, someone who was out to undermine the search for wisdom?

As usual, the culprits are Plato and Aristotle, who very successfully tarred the Greek

Sophus with the brush of duplicity and underhandedness.

For them, and hence for us, sophistry means using rhetorical techniques to induce persuasion without regard to truth or using argumentative tricks to embarrass an opponent.

Aristotle even wrote a work called The Sophistical Refutations, in which he warns the reader about the Sophist tricks, teaching us how to diagnose and avoid their chicanery.

But despite their poor reputation, the Sophus made a major contribution to the history of philosophy.

This isn't to say that they were philosophers exactly, though they did put forward ideas which we might see as philosophical.

It's more that their impact on Socrates and, especially Plato, was enormous.

A truly great philosopher benefits from a truly provocative opponent.

There's no greater philosopher than Plato and he got the most

provocative opponent he could have asked for in the shape of the sophists. It's

interesting to note that whereas only one platonic dialogue came to be titled with the name of a pre-Socratic

philosopher, Parmenities, Plato wrote dialogues named after four of the most important

Sophists, Protagoras, Goryus, hippious, and euthedemous. Another dialogue is called

simply the sophist. In it the characters try to define the word sophist and discover that the sophist is even in this sense difficult to pin down.

Sophist play a major role in several other dialogues, including what I personally consider

...