Protagoras and "Logos": A Study in Greek Philosophy and Rhetoric (review)

Book Reviews Edward Schiappa. Protagorasand "Logos": A Study in GreekPhilosophyand Rhetoric. Studies in Rhetoric/Communication. Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1991. Pp. xviii + 939. Cloth, $99.95. This book is founded on the readily acceptable thesis that not all sophists are alike, and that we therefore stand in need of studies of individual sophists. A subsidiary thesis, drawn (although not uncritically) from the work of Eric Havelock, is that the fifthcentury sophists "had significant roles in the Greek transition from a mythic-poetic to a more humanistic-rationalistic culture" (13). The sophists could well be described as "prose rhapsodes" (58). Because Professor Schiappa is doing a considerable amount of groundbreaking, about half of his short book is devoted to methodology. So, for instance, he argues (convincingly) that to view the sophists as primarily interested in rhetoric is unhistorical . If the term rh~tor/k~ was, as is likely, coined by Plato in the Gorg/as, it becomes more illuminating to discuss Protaguras in terms of logosthan of rhetoric. There is also some adverse criticism of Poulakos' sophistic definition of rhetoric, which is seen as blurring the Rortian distinction between historical and rational reconstruction. On the more positive side, Schiappa adopts the principle that the interpretation of ancient fragments makes most sense when they are taken as responses to issues of their own time rather than as anticipations of modern philosophical concerns. Later, in discussing the two-/og0i fragment, he makes use of a three-stage analysis put forward by Julius Moravcsik as an aid to his interpretation of Heraclitus. In Moravcsik's scheme, Presocratic speculation goes through the following explanatory stages: 1) origin, ~) stuff or constituency, and 3) entities and their attributes. In Schiappa's view, this scheme, though useful, does not give sufficient weight to Protagoras' role in the transition from 9) to 3), Protagoras being "the first recorded Greek thinker to treat language per se as an object of study" (97). In dealing with the actual fragments, Schiappa is crisp and provocative. He is certainly right to insist that Protagoras should not be saddled with the tendentiously translated promise to "make the worse appear the better cause"; more correctly, Protagoras promises to "make the weaker account the stronger." On the other hand, there seems to be something slightly amiss with Schiappa's treatment of the relationship between Protagoras and Parmenides. Protagoras is seen as an opponent of Eieaticism (his h~ ouk estinis a response to Parmenides), but at the same time, the writer is clearly made uneasy by the attribution to "those around Protagoras" of ouk est/n antilegein at Euthydemus 986C. (He has avoided the task of attempting to identify the "those still earlier" who are also said by Plato to have used the same aphorism; that one [277] 278 JOURNAL OF THE HISTORY OF PHILOSOPHY 31:2 APRIL 1993 of these was Parmenides is a strong possibility.) Schiappa takes the line that "it is doubtful that Protagoras would have used the exact language portrayed by Plato" 035), but he does not venture to suggest what words Protagoras might have used instead, and he is quite definite in pointing out the undeniable incompatibility of 0uk estin antilegein with the human-measure and two-logoi fragments. The best he can do is to shift his attention to the defense recounted by Plato in the Euthydemm, which he thinks may have been somewhat different, that is, more Protagorean. My own intuition is that in the Euthydemus passage Plato is engaging in a characteristic piece of seriocomic philosophic mischief, on a par with the attribution of neo-Eleatic arguments to the Heraclitean-Protagorean Cratylus at, for instance, Cratylus 4~9D. In other words, Plato sees (and makes clear at Cratylus 386A-E), that for philosophical results there is nothing to choose between Protagorean relativism and Euthydemian (i.e., Parmenidean) denial of contradiction and false speaking, since both positions issue in the denial of distinctions between wisdom and folly, virtue and vice. Thus, in Plato's view, although Protagoras would not have accepted 0uk estin antilegein, he might just as well havel Schiappa remarks later that Plato's (and Aristotle's) main objections to Protagoras' doctrines were "that his human...