James Baird wrote:
> I've always felt that the sophists were the victims of
> the first smear campaign in recorded history.
They were "traitors to their class" -- and their class and its intellectual servants have never forgiven them for that. You can see one of the ways the smear worked if you follow carefully the debate between Socrates and Thrasymachus in the Republic and note how Plato subtly changes the subject of debate. The initial proposition by Thrasymachus is, in effect, that conceptions of "ought" have a social base. That proposition becomes, "Conceptions of 'ought' *ought* to have a social base" -- which is of course absurd. A proposition about social structure and class is changed into a bizarre statement about how individuals ought to think that "ought" ought NOT to mean ought, or something like that. With that shift it is easy to make Thrasymachus (and implicitly all those who taught politics to the unwashed) a fool.
Carrol
> A good
> (if non-scholarly) book on the totalitarian aspect of
> Socrates' thought is I.F. Stone's "The Trial of
> Socrates".
>
> Jim Baird
>
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