jeffrey fisher wrote:
>
> derrida is much more like a sophist than like socrates
> (himself something of a sophist, though he would have bristled at that
> -- and so, probably, will others on this list) in that derrida thinks
> that the Truth that would guarantee not only the "author's" meaning but
> really any stable meaning doesn't exist.
Most of what we know about the Sophists comes from their enemies.
*****
The Protagoras has to do with the nature of virtue and whether it can be taught. The question is raised in an explicitly political context as Socrates sets the terms for the debate:
**Now when we meet in the Assembly, then if the State is faced with some building project, I observe that the architects are sent for and comsulted about the proposed structure, and when it is a matter of shipbuilding. . . .That is how they behave over subjects they consider technical. But when it is something to do with the government of the country that is to be debated, the man who sets up to advise them may be a builder or equally well a blacksmith or a shoemaker, merchant or shipowner, rich or poor, of good family or none. No one brings it up against any of these . . .that here is a man who without any technical qualifications, unable to point to anybody as his teacher, is yet trying to give advice. The reason must be that they do not think that this is a subject that can be taught. _Protagoras_, 319b-d)**
In reply to Socrates, Protagoras sets out to demonstrate that 'your countrymen act reasonably in accepting the advice of smith and shoemaker on political matters.' And so the fundamental epistemological and ethical questions that form the basis of Greek philosophy, and indeed the whole Western philosophical tradition, are situated in an explicitly political context, having to do with the democratic practice of allowing shoemakers and smiths to make political judgments.
. . . .He [Protagoras] then goes on to show how virtue can be a universal quality without being innate, a quality that must and can be taught. Everyone who lives in a civilized community, especially a polis, is from birth exposed to the learning process that imparts civic virtue, in the home, in school, through admonition and punishment, and above all through the city's customs and laws, its _nomoi_. Civic virtue is both learned and universal in much the same way as one's mother tongue. The sophist who, like Protagoras himself, claims to teach virtue can only perfect this continuous and universal process, and a man can possess qualities of good citizenship without the benefit of the sophist's expert instruction.
Protagoras's emphasis on the universality of virtue is, of course, critical to his defense of democracy. But equally important is his conception of the process by which moral and political knowledge is transmitted. Virtue certainly is taught, but the model of learning is not so much scholarship as _apprenticeship_. . . .
................................
Yet Plato too constructs his definition of political virtue and justice on the analogy of the practical arts. He too draws on the common experience of democratic Athens, appealing to the familiar experience of the labouring citizen by invoking the ethic of craftsmanship. . . .
Both Protagoras and Plato, then, place the cultural values of _techne_, the practical arts of the labouring citizen, at the heart of their political arguments, though to antithetical purposes. . . .For Plato the division between those who rule and those who work with their bodies, betwen those who rule and are fed and those who produce and are ruled, is not simply the basic principle of politics. The division of labour between rulers and producers, which is the essence of justice in _The Republic_, is also the essence of Plato's theory of knowledge. The radical and hierarchical opposition between the sensible and the intelligible worlds, and between their corresponding forms of cognition -- an opposition that has been identified as the msot distinctive characteristic of Greek thought and which has set the agenda for Western philosophy ever since -- is grounded by Plato in an analogy with the social division of labour which excludes the producer from politics. (Ellen Meiksins Wood, _Democracy Against Capitalism_, pp. 192-195) *******
Marx in effect echoes Protagoras, the great Sophist, when he writes, in the Theses on Feuerbach_, of "_revolutionising_ practice" as the resolution of the contradiction "how will the educator be educated."
Attacks on the sophists are, ultimately, attacks on the right of the ordinary citizen to engage in political thought and action.
Carrol
P.S. I'm no great admirer of Derridian thought, but attacks on his academic followers as "frauds," et cetera are simply hysterical.