The Sophistic Movement (review)

289 HISTORY OF PHILOSOPHY G.B. Kerferd. The Sophistic Movement. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981. Pp. vii + 184. Even serious readers of the dialogues of Plato and the works of Aristotle are apt to think of Socrates as not only not influenced by the "Sophists", but even as their deadly enemy. They are apt as well to think of the Sophists as, at best, unscrupulous but clever linguistic tricksters who have no place in serious philosophy. Kerferd's book, though short, is, as he says, "the fruit of many years of study and reflection, of teaching and of argument" (p. vii), concerning the Sophistic movement. It is, as one might expect from earlier publications of Kerferd, devoted to radical correction of the standard image of Sophists and Socrates' relation to them. And it is a masterful piece of scholarship and imaginative reconstruction of texts and arguments. Against the claim that the sophists did not produce a lasting philosophical literature , Kerferd cites a number of texts which document the preservation of sizable works of the 5th century (B.C.) Sophists at least into the Hellenistic period. Against the claim that sophistic works were confined to matters of training in argumentative techniques and rhetoric, Kerford produces numerous texts and recorded doctrines in natural philosophy, mathematics, and political theory. Against the credibility of Plato's anti-sophistic rhetoric, Kerferd cites Plato's repeated appropriation of arguments and doctrines of the Sophists. Even so, Kerferd regards his book as quite incomplete and as prefatory to work not yet done: "What is now wanted is a series of detailed studies of the actual evidence relating to individual sophists, which will take this evidence seriously and will not he inhibited at its very starting point by the conviction that any attribution of significant doctrines to a particular sophist is unlikely to be correct because "The sophists were not the kind of people to entertain serious doctrines" (p. 14). His own chapter on individual Sophists gives brief and summary treatment to each and suggests further work to be done, though it must be said that throughout the book he gives fairly detailed attention to Protagoras in particular. Kerferd attributes much of the animus against the Sophists less to their teaching for fees than to their willingness to teach anyone who was prepared to pay the fee-thus promoting social and political mobility and threatening the old order. And he finds Pericles' encouragement of Sophists (in particular, Protagoras) to be part of Pericles' effi)rt to change the political order in Athens. That there was a market in the fifth century, B.C., for the services of Sophists for the "higher education" of the youth of Greek cities has been often noted. That the education went considerably farther than rhetoric narrowly construed and the ability to defend onself in political and judicial assemblies is less commonly noted. Kerferd makes much of a passage from Plato's Protagoras in which Protagoras says that, were Hippocrates to go to any other Sophist (besides himself), he would be required to study "mathematical calculations and astronomy, geometry, music, and literature" (Prot. 381d9, Kerferd, p. 38). The implication of the use of 'any' in the passage is that all other Sophists would require such studies. Kerferd devotes a chapter to the distinctions between dialectic, eristic, and antilogic, BOOK REVIEWS 283 being at special pains to distinguish the latter two. Antilogic is a technique of opposing (whether as contraries or contradictories) one logos to another for a variety of purposes . As a disciplined procedure, it differs from eristic in that the latter is not as such a technique of argument, though it may involve or use antilogic. Kerferd thinks that Socratic "method" grew out of sophistic use of antilogic and goes on to say, "For Plato, though he does not like to say so, antilogic is the first step on the path that leads to dialectic" (p. 67). Agreeing with the claim of Charles Kahn (The Verb 'be' in Ancient Greek, Dordrecht , 1973) that existential uses of 'to be' in ancient (;reek are late and that all earlier ones should be construed as predicational, Kerferd takes the "cold/hot wind" example from Theaetetus as...