Talk:Sophist

Wiki Education Foundation-supported course assignment
This article was the subject of a Wiki Education Foundation-supported course assignment, between 13 February 2019 and 3 May 2019. Further details are available on the course page. Student editor(s): Camrynbl.

Above undated message substituted from Template:Dashboard.wikiedu.org assignment by PrimeBOT (talk) 09:49, 17 January 2022 (UTC)

Untitled
Before Plato, a sophist was someone who gave sophia to his disciples, i. e. wisdom made from knowledge. Well known sophists: Protagoras, Gorgias, Prodicus and Socrates himself. Not correct, Socrates was against the sophisters. The sophisters killed socrates. I doubt he would be called a sophister. Look up your facts. He despised rhetoric because it didn't involve dialectic (meaning involving the 2 parties reaching the truth, also philosophy). Whereas rhetoric persuades or convinces the opponent in a specious way, may it be right or wrong. Which was what the sophisters introduced and was what Socrates was against. Platon later invented the word rhetoric to make it visible it, rhetoric, only concerned the "form" of the speech and didn't concern the content. Socrates was not a sophister in any way.

Read the trial against socrates and read about Plato (Platon) about his view on the sophisters that got Socrates killed.

If you have read some texts, you'll be familiar with the metaphor of a snake persuading somebody to eat an apple, even though it breakes an agreement or hurts someone. You'll see that the snake in this case is a synonym with sophisters, rhetoricians and the alike, who are trying to convince or persuade without any dialectic, truthseeking.

As you'll see Wikipedia is the perfect anti-sophist example. Sophists charged for the wisdom provided. Wikipedia charges nothing for the wisdom it provides. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 94.191.189.31 (talk) 13:35, 14 May 2015 (UTC)

This is not entirely true. A sophist was originally merely a wise man, and when the meaning of the term changed, it changed to mean a person who took money for education, which Socrates never did. Also, as early as Aristophanes' Clouds, the sophists were being criticized openly for misusing rhetoric in order to deceive. In fact, in Plato's Apology, Socrates makes direct reference to the things Aristophanes accused him of in The Clouds, in particular, being a sophist. While I agree that the sophists got a bad rap from history (We have only ~20 pages of the actual writings of the sophists compared to several plays worth of criticisms of them -- not all from Plato, either!), one cannot ignore that Protagoras himself said that a good rhetorician was able to make the weaker argument seem the stronger. This is not passing along wisdom, this is learning how to spin information to win. Not necessarily a bad thing, but the sophists weren't infallible either.

Once I have it edited, I may post a paper I wrote on the topic here, with citations, etc.

-asilvahalo

Merge
I have merged this article into Sophistry. If there are no objections, I will shortly change this page into a redirect to Sophistry. Any comments? Adam Conover 07:25, Apr 1, 2004 (UTC)

A fresh start for this article?
English Wikipedia is in need of an article "sophist" that does not redirect to the article "sophism." I intend to remove the redirect of "sophist" --> "sophism," but before that is done, we either need to revert "sophist" to an earlier version, or write a new article afresh. If anyone would like to nominate a previous version of "sophist" so that the article can be reverted to it (to become the basis of future edits), I am open to suggestions (or you can do it yourself). If no one offers any reversion suggestions, it may instead be best to compose a new article.TJLaw (talk) 00:04, 1 October 2012 (UTC)

Update: Another user has suggested taking relevant material from the article "sophism" and putting it back into this article, so that is what I will do instead of composing a new article from scratch. Once this is done, the redirect can be removed, and any user who wishes to do so may help edit and improve this article.TJLaw (talk) 01:05, 1 October 2012 (UTC)

Added sophister as this is the correct word as it stems of latin: sophistes. Sophister is also more correct as barrister etc. derives from the same etymology and grammatics. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 94.191.189.31 (talk) 13:31, 14 May 2015 (UTC)

Reorganisation of Sophist and Sophism
These two articles are a bit of a mess, and I intend to clear things up a bit, so I will explain here what I intend to do.

Note that:


 * Both these articles currently concentrate on the intellectual phenomenon of the Sophists in fifth-century BC Greece, with the result that there are effectively two articles on the same subject. This is to say, this is a case of Duplication under WP:OVERLAP. (This is all the more of a problem because there are numerous pages that link to each of the two articles, but pretty much randomly distributed between the two articles without any particular rationale.)
 * The term Sophist can refer, as far as I am aware, to three things: (a) a member of the fifth century BC intellectual phenomenon; (b) an exponent of the Second Sophistic; (c) a deployer of Sophistry in the modern sense. As for (c), there could perhaps be a separate article, but really it is just a word and Wikipedia is not a dictionary. But these are three separate things, and there is no common subject that links them. So there's no need for separate articles Sophist and Sophism. All that is needed is a single article on the Sophists, with a disambiguation tag saying that the article refers to the fifth-century Sophists and linking to Second Sophistic and to the dictionary definition of Sophistry.
 * The term Sophism is actually not very common in Classical scholarship; generally one just talks about the Sophists. Therefore it is not particularly appropriate having an article with the title Sophism, since Wikipedia ought to use the WP:COMMONNAME attested in reliable sources. The Common Name for the fifth-century Sophists is just that, the Sophists.

Therefore:


 * I will shortly merge Sophism into Sophist.
 * I will place a tag at the top of the combined article, to direct the reader to Second Sophistic and to Wiktionary's entry on Sophistry.

The articles may require a bit of tidying up afterwards, and indeed I would at some point like to do some further work on improving the article. However, a necessary first step in order to do this is to remove the duplication, so that there is one single article on the subject. Dionysodorus (talk) 11:46, 20 August 2017 (UTC)


 * I have now done this. There was a lot of duplication between Sophism and Sophist, which I have tried to remove, but there may be a bit. I am not entirely sure all the material in either article is of the highest quality (and some of it isn't referenced), so the new article could do with tidying up a bit. Let me know if any issues I may not have noticed have arisen as a result of this reorganisation, and I will try to correct them. Dionysodorus (talk) 12:33, 20 August 2017 (UTC)

Possible Edits
I'm looking at reorganizing the article's information. There is a lot of good information, but I think it could be improved for readability. I created a sandbox (linked on my user page) for the article to play around with, so please contact me if there is something that needs to be corrected or if you have any suggestions. I'll be drafting some new headings and reorganizing the information. I also want to address some of the repetition that occurred when the Sophism and Sophist articles were merged. This may include rewording or deletion, but more likely the former. Updated details of possible changes will be in the sandbox.Camrynbl (talk) 05:05, 26 February 2019 (UTC)
 * I'm going to start editing the article by renaming some sections and adding sub-headings to organize the information and break up large chunks. — Preceding unsigned comment added by Camrynbl (talk • contribs) 01:26, 6 March 2019 (UTC)

"Sofistik" listed at Redirects for discussion
An editor has identified a potential problem with the redirect Sofistik and has thus listed it for discussion. This discussion will occur at Redirects for discussion/Log/2022 February 16 until a consensus is reached, and readers of this page are welcome to contribute to the discussion. User:1234qwer1234qwer4 (talk) 22:22, 16 February 2022 (UTC)

"Sophistik" listed at Redirects for discussion
An editor has identified a potential problem with the redirect Sophistik and has thus listed it for discussion. This discussion will occur at Redirects for discussion/Log/2022 February 16 until a consensus is reached, and readers of this page are welcome to contribute to the discussion. User:1234qwer1234qwer4 (talk) 22:22, 16 February 2022 (UTC)

First graph under Criticism is confusing
Re: "The sophists' practice of questioning the existence and roles of traditional deities and investigating into the nature of the heavens and the earth prompted a popular reaction against them. The attacks of some of their followers against Socrates prompted a vigorous condemnation from his followers, including  Plato and Xenophon, as there was a popular view of Socrates as a sophist." (my emphasis)

It seems that "their" doesn't refer to the preceding "them" (i.e., sophists) but rather to whoever led the popular reaction against them. Otherwise I can't make sense of the two sentences. I suggest changing second sentence to: "As there was a popular view of Socrates as a sophist, he was among the targets, which prompted a vigorous condemnation from his followers, including  Plato and Xenophon." Yeltommo (talk) 04:31, 14 February 2023 (UTC)


 * I concluded that my analysis was sound and then made my suggested edit. (Does that mean I should delete this topic? My edit summary refers to my analysis here.) Yeltommo (talk) 06:28, 14 February 2023 (UTC)