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NOTES PART 1. SOPHISTIC ARGUMENT AND THE EARLY TRADITION INTRODUCTION 1. Consigny (1994) adds to these the importance of Friedrich Nietzsche’s positive evaluations of the Sophists. 2. Aristotle does distinguish those he calls Eristics from Sophists in the Sophistical Refutations. Both use the same arguments, but not for the same reasons. Eristics aim for the appearance of victory in argument; Sophists aim for the appearance of wisdom (171b34). 3. To appreciate their appearance relative to other contemporary figures, it is useful to point out some of what we know about their dates. Protagoras lived from 490 to 421 b.c.e. approximate dates for Gorgias stretch from around 485 into the fourth century. Prodicus lived from around 460 into the fourth century and like Hippias was alive at the time of Socrates’ death in 399.Thrasymachus is recorded to have been in Athens in 427,andAntiphon’s dates are around 470 to 411.Thucydides’dates are from 460–395,and Euripides’from ca.80 to 406.Plato (ca.427–348),then,was a contemporary of most of these men as well as their students.Aristotle was not born until the fourth century (384–322) and would have been a contemporary of their students. 4. While Aristotle directs the analyses of his Sophistical Refutations against “those whom we call Sophists” (165a34), only three of this core group are mentioned by name (Protagoras, Gorgias, andThrasymachus), and none of them in relation to any particularly serious error. 5. Kerferd observes that we know the names of twenty-six Sophists active in the fifth century (1981, 42). For brief accounts of the core group and relevant texts see chapter 5 of his Sophistic Movement. 6. A metaphor describing the Sophists that, as we shall see, Plato shared with Xenophon. 7. See also Rosen (1983, 313–14). CHAPTER 1. SOPHISTIC ARGUMENT 1. A notable exception is John Poulakos (1997), whose views I discuss below. 2. Elsewhere (1992, 124) Walton contrasts eristic argument with the collaborative , pragmatic models of Grice (1975) and van Eemeren and Grootendorst (1984), 154 Notes to Pages 12–22 clearly indicating a preference for these latter-day accounts. A more appreciative acknowledgment of the Sophists does enter his later study of plausibility arguments (2002, 134, 141). 3. Similarly Marcel Detienne (1996) notes the move in Ancient Greece from a speech, like that of the king or sage, that announces the truth to the secular discourse that persuades others, arriving at a “truth” through the use of reason. 4. The influence here may be less pronounced. De Romilly sees the contrast between Sophocles and Euripides to be partly reflective of the shift from an interest in the influence of the gods to that of humans, with the latter indicative of sophistic themes (1992, 16). 5. As Lloyd (1990, 44) reminds us, the Greek word muthos originally meant story or narrative account rather than myth in the sense of a fiction. 6. A useful account of the nature of Athenian law and its reliance on persuasive speaking can be found inYunis (2005). 7. SeeTodd (1995). 8. This too is a concern that Plato has with the maxim, as he makes his view clear in the Laws: “In our eyes God will be ‘the measure of all things’ in the highest degree—a degree much higher than any‘man’ they talk of ” (716c). 9. Earlier (29) she had proposed as a reason for the disappearance of their writing that it was rarely copied and circulated because it was never aimed at a large public. 10. Thus Grote’s judgment,based on the Memorabilia, seems wrong when he writes that it was Plato who was peculiarly hostile to the Sophists,“as may be seen by the absence of any such marked antithesis in the Memorabilia of Xenophon” (1888, 38). 11. This same concern still registers in contemporary philosophy: as significant a figure as Badiou marks as serious the conflictive relation between philosophy and sophistry because the latter says there are no truths (1999, 132–33). CHAPTER 2. MAKING THE WEAK ARGUMENT THE STRONGER 1. As we will see in chapter 5, the preferred translation of eikota is “likelihoods.” 2. Some of the major translators of the Rhetoric precede Kennedy in this choice: J. H. Freese’s (1926) Loeb translation offers “making the worse appear the better argument”; Cope (1877, 321) translates as “making the worse appear the better argument ”; and W. Rhys Roberts (Aristotle 1941, 1431) “making the worse argument...

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