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Marshall (00:02)

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Hi, welcome to Notions of Progress, the show that traces ideas of progress from antiquity to the age of AI. The word sophist is still in common use. When we describe an argument as sophistry, we mean it is technically clever but fundamentally dishonest. It looks like good reasoning but does not hold up under examination. To call someone a sophist today is almost exclusively an insult.

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That word has carried that meaning for over 2,000 years. Most people who use it have no idea where it comes from or that it may carry an explicit bias built into it from the beginning. So here is the puzzle. The people this word was used to describe were the most sought after teachers in the most dynamic democratic society the ancient world produced. They were advisors to statesmen, authors of constitutions,

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theorists of language, law, and knowledge. These were not charlatans operating on the margins of Athenian intellectual life. They were at its center. So how did the word become an insult? And more importantly, what did these people actually believe about knowledge, about human beings, and about whether civilization can improve and lead to progress? Those are the questions this episode takes seriously.

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To understand the Sophists fairly, we need to understand what happened to their reputation and who may have been responsible. Professor W.K.C. Guthrie in his landmark 1969 work, A History of Greek Philosophy, traces this process carefully. His account identifies two distinct phases. The first attack was cultural and it came during the Sophists' own lifetime.

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In 423 BC, while Protagoras was still teaching, the comic playwright Aristophanes staged the play The Clouds before a mass Athenian audience, casting Socrates as a typical paid sophist teaching students how to make weak arguments look strong. The play's very success as comedy is, as Joshua Billings notes, proof of how widely sophisticated teaching has already spread through Athenian life.

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The second attack was philosophical and it came from Plato. His dialogues are the primary source through which history has shown this office and they are not neutral accounts. Guthrie is precise about this. Plato's portraits were carefully constructed to show this office as practitioners of imitation rather than knowledge, masters of argumentation but lacking in substance. The problem this creates for us is significant.

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Most of this author's own writing are lost. Plato is very nearly the only source we have. Paraphrasing the modern scholar, Moro Bonazzi, many, if not all, testimonies we have about Protagoras are shaped by underlying attitudes of some sort, which in some cases lead to actual distortions of his thought.

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The recovery of the sophist reputation has a contested history. The 19th century English historian George Grote was the first major modern voice to push back against the caricature, but his rehabilitation was immediately challenged. The German historian Edward Zeller counted that the sophist represented precisely the dangers of uncritical enlightenment thinking, and his verdict was unsparing. He said,

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Sophistic enlightenment is in essence superficial and one-sided in its outcomes unscientific and therefore dangerous. Note that Zeller used the comparison of the alignment as an attack. Guthrie on the other hand, writing a century later, took the same comparison and reframed it as a compliment. In his 1969 volume titled Deliberately, The Fifth Century Enlightenment,

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He argued that what happened in Athens between roughly 460 and 400 BC was a genuine intellectual revolution, a new confidence in human reason, a willingness to subject inherited traditions to critical examination, and a conviction that civilization is a human achievement rather than a divine gift.

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So here is what this episode is going to examine. Four questions that are worth sitting with carefully. First, who were the sophists and what made them, in Guthrie's phrase, a fifth century enlightenment? Second, does their historical reputation hold up under scrutiny or was it deliberately constructed by their opponents? Third, what do five Greek terms sophists, techne, arete,

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nomos and physis actually mean and why do they matter beyond this episode? Fourth and lastly and arguably the most important, did the sophist protagonist have a coherent theory of human progress and if so, what are its core principles? These questions all lead back to the one scholarly literature has argued about for over a century. Were the sophists genuinely enlightened thinkers of progress or something more ambiguous?

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I leave that verdict to you. My role as the curator here is to surface the debate.

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Athens in the mid-fifth century BC was a city in transformation. The Persian Wars had ended with a Greek victory that felt like proof of something that human effort, collective decision-making, and civic courage can defeat an empire. Democracy consolidated and political life now demanded rhetorical skills and practical judgment that birth alone could not supply. Guthrie makes a point that is well worth pausing upon.

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The Sophists were not a school. They had no founding text, no shared institution, no common doctrine. But what united them, he argued, was something more interesting and profoundly democratic.

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He said,

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a profession and a set of questions that were willing to ask in public, questions that the Athenian establishment and later Plato found profoundly threatening.

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Billings reads their practice of charging fees as part of what made the movement genuinely democratic. Knowledge was in principle available to anyone with the means and the motivation to seek it.

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These are five Greek terms that will appear throughout this episode and this series. I want to introduce them now as conceptual tools because each one of them carries weight that the English translations just do not fully capture. First, the title for our show, Sophists. One who makes people wise from Sophos, meaning wise or skilled. In 5th century Athens, it referred to intellectuals who taught rhetoric, ethics,

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and the art of living well in a democratic city. The transformation of this word into an insult is a story with specific authors and motives. The next word, techne. We've seen this word before. Systematic, teachable human know-how that reliably produces results when correctly applied. The practice of medicine is a techne. So is navigation, rhetoric.

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carpentry, lawmaking, and education itself. Scholar Rachel Barney describes it as a social practice marked by rationality, one that could be reliably taught, learned, systematized, and explained. The Greeks understood techne as something far broader than what we typically mean by the word technology that's in use today. It did not refer to machines, but the entire domain of purposeful human know-how.

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The next word is arete. This refers to excellence in relation to a thing's purpose. For a human being, for example, it means moral and civic excellence. The Sophists claimed that arete could be taught was highly controversial, a direct challenge to aristocratic culture which held that excellence was inherited.

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The next word, nomos, refers to human law, custom, and convention, the rules that communities create and agree to live by. If justice is nomos, it can be questioned, revised, and improved. Guthrie identifies the tension between nomos as one of the most defining intellectual conflicts of the fifth century and notes that it's never fully been resolved.

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Physis. This refers to nature, the underlying reality of existing completely independent of human choice, and is the polar opposite of nomos. Is justice something humans created and can be improved upon? Or is it built into the nature of things? As Guthrie observes,

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This debate runs from the ancient Stoics through Rousseau to questions about human rights that remain unresolved today.

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Four figures shaped this movement. Protagoras of Abdera, who existed from 490 through 420 BC. The most prominent sophist, Protagoras claimed to teach not just rhetoric, but arete itself. Not merely how to argue, but how to be a better person and citizen. His account of human progress is what this episode is building forward.

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The next figure, Gorgias, lived between 483 and 375 BC. The philosopher of language and persuasion. Gorgias argued that what governs public life is not truth but persuasion, and that rhetoric, the techne of persuasion, is how communities make collective decisions without resorting to violence. This focus on persuasion over truth contributed to this office's poor reputation among their critics.

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Though Guthrie reads it not as cynicism, but as a serious engagement with the limits of human knowledge. The next figure, Hippius, lived between 460 and 400 BC. He was a polymath who taught mathematics, astronomy, rhetoric, and history along with other subjects. Professor Joshua Billings argues that Hippius embodied one of the movement's most characteristically enlightenment-like impulses.

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the systematic collection and organization of knowledge across all domains, treating empirical inquiry itself as the path to human advancement. And our last figure is Prodicus, who lived between 465 and 395 BC. He was the linguist who argued that much of what passes for general conflict is actually just confusion about language.

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What united these four figures, as Guthrie argues, was a willingness to push the no-most physicist distinction, convention versus nature, to its logical conclusion.

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if justice, law, and social hierarchy are human conventions rather than natural facts, they can be questioned, revised, and improved. That is the foundation of something genuinely progressive.

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But by the same logic, it opens a question the sophists could not fully close. And that tension is what the rest of this episode is about.

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Protagoras, Fewer than 10 authentic fragments of his work survive. But scholars like Guthrie, Bonazzi, and Barney argued that they are enough to reveal something that the standard account tends to obscure. Let's begin with Protagoras' voice here. He said, of all things, the measure is man.

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Of those that are, that they are. And of those that are not, that they are not. The most common reading is that this is a statement of relativism. No objective reality, truth varies from person to person. But Guthrie Barney and Mauro Bonazzi all challenge this theory. Bonazzi argues that man here refers not to an abstract universal subject,

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but to each individual human being in context. And that measure means the standard by which things present themselves, not the creator of divine truth. On this reading, human experience and collective judgment are the only legitimate criteria we have. And the political implication Guthrie argues is that no human being has privileged access to truth, and therefore no human being has the right to rule on that basis. The next fragment.

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He stated as follows, about the gods I am unable to know either that they exist or that they do not exist or what form they might have. For there is much to prevent knowledge, the obscurity of the subject and the shortness of human life.

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Professor Benazi is careful about what this protagorean statement means. This is not atheism. It is an epistemological position. The question exceeds what human experiences can settle. On Benazi's reading, it is a statement of principled intellectual humility, and it clears the ground for something very important. If we cannot appeal to divine authority to settle questions of justice and law,

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then those questions must be worked out through what human beings have constructed together, through nomos. That move, Guthrie argues, is enlightenment-like in its refusal to accept inherited authority as a substitute for reasoned inquiry.

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So here's what Protagoras actually claimed to teach. He called it eubulia, which roughly translates to good deliberation and judgment. Professor Barney argues that this is the defining term for understanding what Protagoras was actually offering. In Plato's dialogue, Protagoras describes his teaching as excellence in deliberation about household matters and the affairs of the city. How to be the most capable in both action and speech.

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Barney notes this phrasing is almost identical to how Thucydides describes deleted pericles. Protagoras on her reading was offering to produce the next generation of democratic statesmen. Now here is what Benazi's reading surfaces that is genuinely surprising. Protagoras, who was routinely cited as the founding theorist of progress through accumulated technical skills, techne,

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was actually skeptical of Technet as sufficient. According to Plato's Protagoras, he criticized hippies and Prodicus for teaching

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geometry, and astronomy, arguing these disciplines would not sufficiently serve the average citizen. What Protagoras considered essential was not only technical expertise, but also political art, the capacity to deliberate well and act justly in conditions of genuine uncertainty.

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Well, what this reveals according to Billings is that the sophisticated movement contains its own internal debate about the nature of progress. On one side, hippies and prodigies for whom technical accumulation is the measure of all advancement. And then on the other side, Protagoras for whom technical capability is not progress but actually danger.

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Billings argues that this internal debate maps into question very much alive today, and I will leave that observation up to you.

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Marshall

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The following dialogue comes not from Protagoras, but from Plato's dialogue named after him. A distinction Bonazzi and Guthrie both agree has a lot of merit. Whether the argument faithfully represents the historical Protagoras or has been shaped by Plato's own purposes is, as Bonazzi puts it, a question the scholarly literature has not settled. The Myth. The story begins before human beings exist.

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The gods have assigned two brothers, Prometheus and Epimetheus, to task of equipping each species, both animal and human, with what it will need to survive.

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Epimetheus volunteers to go first. He works carefully through the animal kingdom, granting speed to some, strength to others, and grants thick hides still to others. By the time he reaches human beings, he has nothing left to give. Therefore, humans enter the world with no natural advantages at all. Epimetheus, whose name means something close to afterthought, ends up living up to his namesake.

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Prometheus, on the other hand, sees what has happened and he acts quickly. He steals two things from the gods, fire and Technae, from Athena. With fire comes warmth and cooked food. With Technae, skills, comes the capacity to build tools, construct shelter, work metal, navigate and pass knowledge across generations. The foundational needs for civilization are now in place.

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Or so we thought. But even with fire and techne, humans were unable to form stable communities. When danger came, they scattered. When they tried to gather into cities, they committed injustices against one another. Zeus intervened, sending Hermes with two further gifts. Decay, justice, and eidos translated roughly as shame or mutual respect, or the recognition that others also have standing.

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Guthrie draws the conclusion directly that practical wisdom and skills are not enough. Political virtue is therefore a necessity. Zeus further gives Hermes a specific instruction about how to distribute these gifts, which Guthrie identifies as the most politically significant line in the entire myth. He said, let all have their share. There could be no cities if only a few possess justice.

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and shame as they possess the other skills. So it was not just the aristocracy, it was all. Guthrie argues this is one of the most explicitly democratic claims in all of ancient philosophy, not primarily an account of how civilization developed, but a claim about who is entitled to participate in it. Professor Barney makes a related observation. The near identical language between Protagoras' description of his teaching

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and Thucydides' portrait of Pericles suggests this was not abstract philosophy. Protagoras, she argued, was offering a theoretical foundation for Periclean democratic practice for all.

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This myth is almost always read as a celebration of Techné, as the engine of human progress. But Bonazzi invites us to read more carefully into this.

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Phase two is not the end point, he argues. It is a failure if it stands alone. The myth's real argument is carried by Zeus's democratic distribution of justice and shame. Political virtue, not technical skill alone, makes civilization possible. Technae is necessary, but it is not sufficient. Guthrie argues this converges with what we find the protagonist's own fragments, his skepticism towards technical disciplines

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His insistence that good deliberation and judgment is what democratic life requires. The myth in this reading is an argument that ingenuity alone cannot advance civilization. It must be accompanied by political wisdom.

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Therein lies attention at the heart of the sophisticated framework that Guthrie, Barney, and Billings all identify.

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If justice is nomos, human convention, it has no foundation beyond the fact that people have agreed to it. Guthrie points out that if justice is only convention, what prevents somebody from arguing that the convention is merely a mask for power? In the hands of other figures who appear in Plato's dialogues,

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the nomos physis distinction was pushed to exactly that conclusion.

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Thrasymachus argues in the Republic that justice is a constraint invented by the weak to limit the strong.

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Calicles and Gorgias goes further. Genuine justice on his reading of the Physicist is the rule of the stronger. So Barney identifies this as the central philosophical problem Plato inherited from the Sophists, the one that drives the argument of the Republic.

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These are positions Protagoras himself would almost certainly have rejected. But Guthrie's point is that the logical structure of the no-most-physicist distinction made them available, and that is the wound that this office could not close. In part two, we will turn to Plato's response. Plato did not simply dismiss this office. He engaged with their argument seriously.

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inherited their questions and built an ambitious philosophical system in response to the problem this office had opened. We will examine what Plato thought progress actually looks like, not through the accumulation of skill and better institutions, but as a vertical ascent of the individual soul toward eternal truth. And we will ask whether Plato answered this office or simply moved the problem to a place where it became harder to challenge.

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I'll see you in part two.