Leviathan & The Art Of Rhetoric and The Art Of Sophistry (Two Books With Active Table of Contents) - Kindle edition by Thomas Hobbes, Sir William Molesworth.
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Excellent and easily accessible layout via kindle kindle app for iPhone in my case. I am a readaholic. This is yet another book that was recommended to me. Human nature does not change, this book is a must read for those that care about what happens today.
The Sophists
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Thomas Hobbes of Malmesbury also Thomas Hobbes of Malmsbury was a British philosopher and a seminal thinker of modern political philosophy. His ideas were marked by a mechanistic materialist foundation, a characterization of human nature based on greed and fear of death, and support for an absolute monarchical form of government.
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His book Leviathan established the foundation for most of Wes Thomas Hobbes of Malmesbury also Thomas Hobbes of Malmsbury was a British philosopher and a seminal thinker of modern political philosophy. On the most plausible construal of subjectivism no one's belief can contradict anyone else's belief, but that does not appear to rule out an individual's having inconsistent beliefs. Though Protagoras seems to have had a fairly high tolerance threshold for inconsistency, it is hard to see how one and the same person could assert both that it is impossible to contradict and that on every matter there are two opposed logoi.
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The wording of the attribution to Protagoras in the Euthydemus is suspiciously vague, suggesting that Plato is attributing to Socrates a vague memory of Protagorean subjectivism, rather than precise recall of any particular doctrine. Protagoras' account of social morality in the Great Speech, according to which the universal acceptance of justice and self-restraint is necessary for the perpetuation of society, and thereby for the preservation of the human species, places Protagoras firmly on one side the conservative side, we should note of the debate about the relation between law and convention nomos on the one hand and nature or reality phusis on the other, which was central to moral and social thought in the fifth and fourth centuries.
The debate was fundamentally about the status of moral and other social norms; were such norms ever in some sense part of or grounded in the reality of things, or were they in every case mere products of human customs, conventions or beliefs? The question was crucial to the perceived authority of norms; both sides agreed in seeing nature as authoritative for correct human behavior, and as the ultimate source of true value. We find examples of the critical stance both in some Platonic dialogues and in some sophistic writings.
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The starkest expression of the opposition between nomos and phusis is that expressed in the Gorgias by Callicles, a pupil of Gorgias though there is no suggestion in the dialogue or elsewhere that Gorgias himself held that position: Callicles holds that conventional morality is a contrivance devised by the weak and unintelligent to inhibit the strong and intelligent from doing what they are entitled by nature to do, viz.
He is thus an inverted moralist, who holds that what it is really right to do is what it is conventionally wrong to do.
The sophist Thrasymachus maintains a similar position in Book I of the Republic , though without Callicles' daring inversion of values. He agrees with Callicles in praising the ruthless individual above all the tyrant who is capable of overcoming the restraints of morality, but whereas Callicles calls such self-assertion naturally just, Thrasymachus abides by conventional morality in calling it unjust.
Both agree that a successful life of ruthless self-assertion is supreme happiness, and that that is what nature prompts us to seek; both, then, accept the normative authority of nature over nomos. The difference between them is that Callicles takes the further step of identifying the authority of nature with that of real, as opposed to conventional morality, whereas for Thrasymachus there is only one kind of morality, conventional morality, which has no authority. In Book II Glaucon presents a modified version of Thrasymachus' position; while maintaining, as Protagoras does in the Great Speech, that humans adopt moral conventions as a necessary survival strategy in a hostile world, he insists that this involves a stunting of human nature, since people are obliged for self-protection to abandon the goal of self-satisfaction to which nature, as Thrasymachus insists, prompts them.
This assertion of egoism is supported by the thought-experiment of Gyges' ring; if, like the legendary Gyges, we had a magic ring which rendered us invisible, and hence immune from sanctions, we would all seek our own interest without restraint. We find a similar down-grading of convention in favor of nature though one lacking the immoralist conclusions in Hippias' speech in the Protagoras c—d , where he urges that intellectuals such as are gathered in the house of Callias ought not to quarrel, since, though according to artificial political conventions they are citizens of many different cities, by nature they are all akin.
The conventions which make them treat each other as strangers distort the reality by which they are all alike; hence they should recognise that reality by treating each other as friends and members of the same family, not as strangers. The vignette gains added point from the fact that Hippias, speaking in Athens, is a citizen of Elis, a Peloponnesian state allied to Sparta in the war against Athens.
Nature prompts us to do only what is advantageous to us, and if we try to act contrary to its promptings we inevitably suffer for it as a natural consequence, whereas morality typically restrains us from doing what is advantageous to ourselves and requires us to do what is disadvantageous, and if we violate the requirements of morality we come to harm only if we are found out.
Legal remedies are insufficient to prevent the law-abiding person from harm, since they are applicable only after the harm has been done, and there is always the chance that the law-abiding person will lose his case anyway. Another part of the papyrus fragment B suggests that some legal norms are self-contradictory; it is just to bear true witness in court, and unjust to wrong someone who has not wronged you. So someone who bears true witness against someone who has not wronged him e. The argument here depends on an illicit assimilation of harming with wronging: Moreover, he thereby puts himself in danger of retaliation by the person whom he has wronged; so once again obedience to nomos is disadvantageous.
On the other side of the debate, as we have seen, we have Protagoras' contention in the Great Speech that law and morality are themselves natural developments, necessary for human survival and the growth of civilization. Protagoras agrees with Glaucon that moral and legal conventions arise ultimately from the need for cooperation in a hostile world, but rejects the latter's Thrasymachean egoism, with its implication that morality is merely a second-best, to be rejected if circumstances allow the individual to pursue his natural goal of unrestrained self-interest.
Morality, for Protagoras, consists in justice and self-restraint, dispositions which involve the replacement of Thrasymachean egoism by genuine regard for others as of equal moral status with oneself, and the crucial lesson of the Great Speech is that those dispositions, so far from requiring the stunting of human nature as Glaucon maintains, in fact constitute the perfection of that nature. This defence of the authority of nomos rests on the idea that nomos itself, in the sense of legal and moral convention, arises from phusis.
A different, though related, defence of nomos assumes a distinction between on the one hand the moral and legal conventions of particular societies, assumed to be the product of human agreement, and on the other certain fundamental moral norms, alleged to be common to all societies, whose origin is to be traced, not to any agreement, but to the original constitution of human nature, traditionally attributed to the creation of humans by the gods; these norms were generally agreed to include the obligations to respect one's parents and to worship the gods.
The conception of natural or unwritten law is frequently appealed to in oratory and drama, notably Sophocles' Antigone see Guthrie pp.
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There is, then, no uniform sophistic position in the nomos-phusis debate; different sophists, or associates of sophists, are found among the disputants on either side. Such speculations were not without their implications for the traditional Olympian pantheon; Xenophanes clearly intends to mock the cultural relativity of anthropomorphism, pointing out that different races of humans depict their gods in their own image, and suggesting that if horses and cattle could draw they would do the same DK 21B15— On the positive side he proclaims a single supreme non-anthropomorphic divinity, which appears to be identified either with the cosmos itself or with its intelligent directive force DK 21B23—6.
This type of theology is naturalistic, but non-reductive; Heraclitus is not saying that God is nothing but cosmic fire, implying that that fire is not really divine, but rather that divinity, or the divinities that matter, is not a super-hero like Apollo, but the everlasting, intelligent, self-directing cosmos itself. In the fifth century the naturalistic approach to religion exhibits a more reductive aspect, with a consequent move towards a world-view which is not merely naturalistic, but in the modern sense secular.
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Some sophists contributed to that process of secularisation. It is convenient to start with Anaxagoras, who, though not generally counted as a sophist, in that he did not offer instruction in how to live or teach rhetoric, nevertheless shared the scientific interests of sophists such as Hippias, and personified the growing rationalistic approach to natural phenomena. Plato, Apology 26d , he did mean that it was nothing other than a rock, i.
Plutarch's story Life of Pericles 6 of the one-horned ram neatly encapsulates the opposed world-views: Anaxagoras dissected the animal's skull and showed that the single horn grew naturally out of a deformity of the brain. So, Plutarch reports, the people admired Anaxagoras but admired Lampon even more when Thucydides was ostracized soon afterwards. The naturalistic approach to meteorology etc. Among the phenomena for which reductive explanations were offered in the fifth century was the origin of religious belief itself.
An alternative account, or rather two accounts, equally reductive, of the origin of religion is attributed to Prodicus, who is reported by various sources as holding that the names of gods were originally applied either to things which are particularly important in human life, such as the sun, rivers, kinds of crops etc. It was presumably on the basis of this that Prodicus was counted as an atheist in antiquity Aetius I. The speaker apparently Sisyphus himself begins with the picture of primitive human origins familiar from Protagoras' Great Speech: Of course atheism expressed by a character in a play cannot be directly attributed to the author, whoever he was; this is merely one of the expressions in fifth-century drama of a wide range of attitudes to religion, ranging from outright atheism e.
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The significance of the Sisyphus fragment is rather as further evidence of the fact that in the late fifth century the rationalistic approach to the natural world, including human nature, provided the intellectual foundation of a range of views hostile to traditional religion, including explicit atheism. From Protagoras himself we have a first-person declaration, not of atheism, but of agnosticism, in what was apparently the opening of his work On the Gods: According to some sources the outrage occasioned by this work led to his books being publicly burned and his being forced to flee from Athens to escape prosecution, and he is said by some to have drowned while trying to escape by sea DK 80A1—4, That story suggests that he was seen as a threat to traditional religion, much as Anaxagoras and later Socrates was, but the evidence of Plato's Meno 91e see above gives an altogether different picture, since in that passage Socrates describes him as having had an unblemished reputation during forty years of activity as a sophist, a reputation, moreover, which has lasted from his death till the present day, i.
Protagoras' avowed agnosticism did not, then, provoke public outrage or even bring him into ill-repute, and it is worth considering why not. It is probable, then, that Protagoras was supportive of traditional religious practice, while the wording of his proclamation of agnosticism does not even offer a direct challenge to conventional belief. He cannot know whether or not the gods exist or what they are like; this presumably though in the light of Protagorean subjectivism the inference is not as secure as it would otherwise be implies that no-one can know these things, but lack of knowledge is no bar to belief, particularly if that belief is socially useful, as Protagoras probably thought it was.
Overall, it is likely that Protagoras' position on religious belief and practice was as conservative as his general social and moral views. If Xenophon's portrayal of Hippias' moral stance see above is historically accurate, then he held a deeply traditional view of the gods as authors of the unwritten law. Euenus is otherwise known chiefly as a poet though Plato Phaedrus a mentions some contributions to rhetorical theory , and his appearance in this context indicates the continuation into the sophistic era of the older tradition of the poet as moral teacher see above.
If Gorgias is included in this context among the teachers of excellence, there is a difficulty in that at Meno 95c Meno, a pupil of Gorgias, says that what he most admires about him is that not only does he never claim to teach excellence, but that he makes fun of those who do. Consistently with that, in the dialogue named after him he begins by claiming that what he has to teach is not any system of values, but a technique of persuasion, which is in itself value-free, but is capable of being employed for whatever purposes, good or bad, are adopted by the person who has mastered it, just as skill in martial arts can be used for good ends or bad a—c.
But in fact the distinction is not so clear, since Gorgias is readily induced to agree that a political orator has to know what is right and wrong, and that he Gorgias will teach his pupil those things if he happens not to know them already a—c. Perhaps it is assumed that normally the pupil will know in advance what is right and wrong, so Gorgias will not have to teach him that, and can concentrate on the essential skill of persuasion. But the point of learning to persuade will be to gain power over others, and thereby to achieve personal and political success.