Sophistry as a Way of Life

Abstract

Socrates’s life is noteworthy not least for its unnatural end: Socrates was executed by democratic Athens on a twofold charge of not believing in the city’s gods and of corrupting the young. Inasmuch as Socrates’s way of life and the death to which it led are intended by Plato to be instructive and even exemplary, he seems intent on indicating a fundamental tension between the philosophic life as Socrates lived it and political life, even when, as in the case of Athens, it is characterized by considerable freedom and enlightenment. This tension is treated most directly in the four dialogues that depict the trial and execution of Socrates (Euthyphro, Apology of Socrates, Crito, and Phaedo). Yet interwoven with these most political works are three dialogues that record conversations originally occurring immediately before (Theaetetus) and immediately after (Sophist, Statesman) the initiation of court proceedings against Socrates (Theaetetus 210d1–4). And this trilogy of dialogues presents Socrates in his relation to the two great camps of philosophy prior to him, that represented by (among others) Heraclitus, who stressed the fundamental importance of motion or a certain kind of “relativism,” and that of Parmenides, who evidently denied motion altogether (consider Theaetetus 152e2–5).