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

Anaximenes

Imagine from: http://deloespeculativoaloaplicable.blogspot.com/2008/11/otro-que-nos-dice-quien-fue-primero-yo.html, edited by Rocío Cruz.

Anaximenes continued with Anaximander and Thales’s position about the first principle, but he proposed a new one.

Anaximenes followed Anaximander’s teaching that said that the first principle must be one of the basic elements and so he chose AIR AS THE ARCHÊ. (Helen Buss Mitchell)

According to Helen Buss Mitchell, Anaximenes thought that everything comes from air and therefore everything is air. When I say everything, it means that even divine things derive from it. He supported his theory saying that since AIR IS INFINITE it can produce all things without being produced by anything.

I was trying to find out why Anaximenes chose air and not water or another element as the first principle. Suddenly, I realized that maybe he concluded that it was the most important element because of what he observed in the environment.

For example, I imagined Anaximenes watching what a horse does in a normal day. He may have seen the horse drinking water and he may have concluded that water was something basic in our lives, but that it wasn’t necessary to drink it the whole day, just at some hours.
He may have noticed that unlike water, air is something that we need all the time. Every single second we need to get air from our environment to stay alive, even though we don’t think about it.

This is the way that Anaximenes may have thought that air is the origin of everything and that we are all air. I would like to say that this wasn’t the way Anaximenes concluded his theory. I’m just imagining how it could have been.

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

Posted by Rocío del Mar Cruz López.