Adrian Buck’s Reviews > A History of Greek Philosophy, Volume 3: The Fifth Century Enlightenment, Part 1: The Sophists > Status Update

"Protagoras, we know, maintained that there are two contrary arguments on every subject, and himself composed two books of 'Antilogies'. In this way he set his pupils to debate, reconciling the opposing views or justifying one against the other." - I've used an ELT book, 'For and Against' in the same way, 2,500 years later.

"[Plato] reserved his attack for the corrupting forces which he considered responsible for the downfall of [Critias et al.] the licence and mob-oratory prevailing under the democracy and the rhetorical teachers who claimed that the art of speaking has nothing to do with moral standards." - this book has transformed my appreciation of Plato.

"KAIROS, the right time or opportunity, for as Disraeli also knew, 'the opportune in a popular assembly has sometimes more success than the weightiest efgorts of research and reason'

Monothesism, pantheism - "On the whole it is better to avoid these labels, which though made up from Greek roots were alien to the Greeks themselves" - perhaps where he should have started this discussion.

"In Plato's eyes the first and greatest crime against religion is not open atheism but the encouragement of supetstition" - was there any public religion in the classical world that wasn't superstition?

"This theory would come easily to the mind of a rationalzing Greek, for in his literaure from Homer onwarda he would find the name of the appropriate god used for the substance itself" - this whole discussion doesn't really escape our own conception of 'God' which is obviously different to the Greeks.

"Astronomers (say Plato) got the name of athiests because some ... thought that the heavenly bodies were carried around by necessity. But [others] ... decided that although the stars themsleves might be lifeless clods and stones, there was a mind behind them directing their movement and the whome cosmic order." - the key word is behind, when do we draw back the last veil?

"As 'enlightenment' grows, it shows itself under two main aspects ... first, the determination to believe only in what is reasonable ... secondly a genuine concern ... with the amelioration of human life and the elimination of cruelty" - and when Greco-Roman civilization became Christian, was that enlightenment?

"In their conclusions Gorgias and Protagoras were at one, and if there is anything that may be spoken of as a general sophistic view, it is this, that there is not 'criterion'. You and I cannot, by comparing our experiences, correct them..." - isn't this at odds with their educational missìon?

"The Sophists, then, were not the pioneers of rhetoric, but they were certainly ready to step in and supply the demand for it which accompanied the development of personal freedom all over Greece" - cause/effect?