james.irldaly at ntlworld.com wrote:
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> So Karl Popper would say. But why was Plato's name put on Lenin's mausoleum? Marx did not belong to the sophistic tradition. The royalist Hobbes did. Sir Karl was a bourgeois wolf in proletarian sheep's clothing, crying crocodile tears over his prey (mixed metaphor intended -- it makes the image more Disneyesque).
Well I can't answer re Lenin's tomb, but Marx was very protective of Aristotle, Plato, & Ricardo: _he_ could criticize them but was apt to snarl when others did. (Whitehead remarked, and I'm not sure Marx would have vigorously disagreed, that the history of western philosophy was a series of footnotes to plato.) As to Karl Popper -- no one can be wrong about _everything_!
Perhaps we have different perspectives on the Sophists: I certainly see the _whole_ "democratic" (rule of the people) tradition as flowing back to the Sophists, with their claim that Virtue could be taught: i.e., that excellence was socially/historically grounded, not an inherent feature of select individuals. And one could argue that Hobbes's theory (materialist) was more important than his mere opinions (royalist).
Carrol