Sophists

Sophists: teachers of the practical application for philosophy, they showed their students how to use the science of rhetoric in order to be successful.

Have you ever been to a political meeting? Politicians just talk and talk and talk about what they are going to do. But are they really going to do something? The truth is that politicians are great orators, and they have an extraordinary capacity to convince people trough speech; however the convincement is rarely for the content of their ideas, but for their enthusiasm and rhetoric.

When politicians (some of them) give a speech they start talking about a subject and they can go on and on for hours because they know how to create coherent sentences and make it look like they know what they are saying. But if you asked them 5 minutes after they finished what where they talking about, and what did they promise, they would not remember half of the things they said.

In the last political campaigns we all watched politicians promising, they were everywhere, on tv, on the streets and even knocking on your door. What the actual politicians do is what sophists thought Greek politicians to do more than 1500 years ago. Sophists believed that since there is no one universally appropriate way of doing anything then there can be no absolutes of any kind, everything is relative. For them appearances are reality and “man is the measure of all things”. Sophists promised success to those that had the required tuition ($$) and were disposed to work hard on the science of rhetoric. So I infer that Political Sciences teach rhetoric, therefore politicians use the same techniques they did 1500 years ago.

Some famous sophists were Gorgias and Protagoras, the last one was the one that said that “man is the measure of all things”. Nowadays to be called a sophist means that you are all flash and no substance (hmm hmm politicians).

Bibliography:Mitchell, Helen Buss. Roots of Wisdom. Belmont, CA: Thomson, 2008.

Gabriela Maldonado