Richard McKirahan’s new book on the sophists appears in Routledge’s Ancient Philosophies series, which aims to provide students of philosophy and classics with “fresh and engaging new introductions to the major schools of philosophy of antiquity” (p. ii). While nobody today would describe the sophists as a philosophical school, George Kerferd’s influential monograph The Sophistic Movement (1981) has made it common to speak of them as constituting an intellectual movement. For Kerferd and many others, “movement” is a convenient way to refer to the sophists that avoids assumptions about doctrinal uniformity, acknowledges the porous borders between putatively “sophistic” and other forms of intellectual activity, and, most importantly, suggests that the sophists’ thought developed in conversation with each other and other intellectuals.[1]
McKirahan rejects the idea of a sophistic movement, arguing that the sophists each had their own “special interests” (p. ix) and were “distinct individuals” (p. 7) who ought to be treated as such. Hence the book’s organization, the core of which consists of seven chapters (Chapters 2–8) that cover eight thinkers commonly (but not uniformly) called sophists by ancient authors or modern scholars: Protagoras, Gorgias, Antiphon, Hippias, Prodicus, Thrasymachus, and, together, the brothers Euthydemus and Dionysodorus. These are followed by four chapters on topics regularly associated with the sophists (logos, definition, antilogic, and the nomos/phusis debate), and three chapters on the reception of the sophists by Isocrates, Plato, and Aristotle. McKirahan also includes translations of several important texts in an appendix and provides a useful bibliography organized by thinker and topic.
Given the individuality of the sophists, as McKirahan has it, what gives coherence to the sophists as a category suitable for a book called The Sophists? For McKirahan, the answer is mostly sociological: the sophists are united by being the first teachers of higher education in Greece (pp. ix, 4, 7). The need for rhetorical training in the Athenian democracy provided the impetus for their rise (pp. 3–5), and professional rivalry for students, money, and fame encouraged each sophist to carve out a distinct niche for himself (pp. ix, 7). The sociological approach captures something true about many of the sophists, but it also makes distinguishing them from other educators of well-off, politically connected young men (e.g., Stesimbrotus of Thasos, Damon of Oa) a difficult task.
These definitional problems have led some to argue that there is no clear way to demarcate the sophists from other types of intellectuals.[2] There is a tendency in McKirahan’s book, however, to treat the “Sophist” as a rigid category, something which one clearly is or is not, a tendency that stands in tension with the book’s thesis about individuality. This is seen above all in the appendix to the introduction, where, in discussing the book’s scope, McKirahan compiles a list of twenty-seven thinkers called sophists by ancient authors or modern scholars, which he narrows down to the eight mentioned above. Some are omitted from consideration because too little is known about them (e.g., Lycophron and Xeniades), but several are left out because, on McKirahan’s view, they are not properly sophists. Bryson is omitted because “he is known as a mathematician,” and Aristippus because “he is normally considered a philosopher, not a Sophist” (p. 13), even though both are called sophists by Aristotle. McKirahan, moreover, acknowledges that Aristippus charged fees for teaching but claims that otherwise “there is no information about his ‘sophistic’ activities” (p. 13). One wonders what those activities could be, since McKirahan treats the sophists primarily as professional educators. The most noteworthy omissions are the Anonymus Iamblichi and the Dissoi Logoi, both of which commonly appear in works on the sophists. McKirahan acknowledges that these texts are relevant to sophistic thought but omits them because we know nothing of their authors, including “whether they engaged in activities (such as teaching) that were regarded as typical of Sophists” (p. 12).[3] Despite being some of the lengthiest extant non-Platonic texts related to the sophists, McKirahan finds that they “give no help toward determining what a Sophist is” (pp. 12–13). This is not to say that McKirahan ought to have included all these thinkers—one needs to make decisions, and the figures McKirahan settled on are generally those about whom we can say the most. At the same time, much interesting and important evidence is simply ignored because of McKirahan’s resolutely individualistic and biographical approach.
There is, of course, room for an approach that focuses on the sophists individually: one criticism of the thematic organization adopted by The Cambridge Companion to the Sophists was that “readers looking for an overview of the state of the field in scholarship on Protagoras, for example, will need to piece together such an analysis from among various chapters” (BMCR 2024.08.36). McKirahan’s chapters on the individual sophists are generally good introductions that offer biographical overviews and interpretations of the major fragments, ideas, and topics associated with each sophist. Chapter 2, on Protagoras, gives a compelling interpretation of the “great speech” in Plato’s Protagoras, argues that so-called Protagorean relativism is a fiction, and briefly surveys Protagoras’ contributions to religious and mathematical thought, among other topics. Chapter 3 provides a reliable guide for the student approaching Gorgias for the first time. Offering an analysis of the argumentative structures of Helen, Palamedes, and On What is Not, or On Nature, McKirahan reflects on Gorgias’ intent in producing such playful and paradoxical works. Chapter 4, on Antiphon, discusses the nature and purpose of the Tetralogies and On Truth. Chapter 5 demonstrates Hippias’ polymathic tendencies by discussing his contributions to astronomy, mathematics, chronology, ethnography, and doxography. Chapter 6 discusses Prodicus’ views about the origins of religious belief, offers an exegesis of the “Choice of Heracles,” and then briefly considers evidence for his views about the physical world and the impossibility of contradiction (though he ultimately rejects the value of this evidence). Chapter 7, on Thrasymachus, focuses primarily on the Republic and is rather skeptical that we can uncover much about the historical Thrasymachus from it. Chapter 8, on Euthydemus and Dionysodorus of Chios (not Chalcedon, as the chapter title incorrectly states), focuses on their method of refutation as presented in Plato’s Euthydemus and considers, in an appendix, the relationship between eristic and the Socratic method. As this summary indicates, McKirahan covers a wide variety of topics, including those not always closely associated with sophistic thought. The discussion of geometrical problems in the chapters on Protagoras (pp. 33–34), Antiphon (pp. 54–55), and Hippias (p. 59) illustrates this, and McKirahan is particularly good at connecting mathematics to other areas of the sophists’ thought, such as when he analyzes Protagoras’ erroneous claim that “a circle does not touch a straight-edge at a point” as potentially stemming from a desire to clarify the relation between geometry and the physical world (pp. 33–34).
These chapters generally stop short of advancing a holistic interpretation of each sophist, often preferring instead to analyze each text or fragment individually. The incomplete nature of the evidence often warrants this approach, but at times McKirahan’s organizational choices make the interpretation of a single text or area of a sophist’s thought difficult to grasp. For instance, McKirahan’s excellent discussion of the centrality of language to Gorgias’ thought is cut short when he defers Gorgias’ treatment of definition to the thematic chapter on definition (Chapter 10). More significantly, most of the evidence for Protagoras’ and Prodicus’ contributions to the study of language are found not in the chapters on the individual sophists but in the thematic chapters on logos (Chapter 9), definition (Chapter 10), and antilogic (Chapter 11). It is somewhat surprising that in these thematic chapters McKirahan generally avoids placing the sophists in conversation with one another. For example, Chapter 10, on definition, falls into two parts. The first, on Gorgias, reads Plato’s Meno alongside the opening of the Helen and suggests that Gorgias treats defining as finding paradigmatic cases. The second, on Prodicus, examines some of his famed verbal distinctions and argues that his approach to definition is basically taxonomical. There is virtually no discussion, however, on the relation between these approaches or whether Prodicus was influenced by Gorgias (or vice versa). Since McKirahan is relatively uninterested in putting the sophists in conversation with one another, it might have benefited his thesis to place this material in the chapters on Gorgias and Prodicus, respectively, to present a more complete picture of each thinker.
McKirahan’s rigid approach also has the unfortunate effect of isolating the sophists from their intellectual context. In his treatment of nomos and phusis (Chapter 12), for example, McKirahan notes that the topic is treated in virtually all areas of Greek intellectual activity. He nevertheless stipulates that “since this book is about the Sophists the present chapter will restrict itself to the three Sophists known to have contributed to the discussion of this subject” (p. 115). A consideration of the larger context of the debate, however, would at least help clarify the positions of the various sophists who contributed to it. McKirahan’s approach at times shuts down potentially rewarding avenues of inquiry. It stands in contrast both to recent work on fifth-century intellectual culture that demonstrates the benefits of transcending disciplinary or generic boundaries, such as Joshua Billings’ The Philosophical Stage (2021) and Scarlett Kingsley’s Herodotus and the Presocratics (2024, BMCR 2024.10.27), and to recent overviews of the sophists, such as Mauro Bonazzi’s The Sophists (2020) and The Cambridge Companion to the Sophists (2023), which include important comparanda from the tragedians, historians, and medical writers.
In sum, McKirahan’s volume might be used profitably in classes on ancient philosophy or Greek intellectual culture. It offers reliable introductions to some of the major sophists accompanied by translations of important texts at a moderate price (the paperback is under $40). It could work well in a class on Plato, for example, to help students better understand many of Socrates’ most notorious interlocutors. However, potential adopters should be aware that McKirahan, despite providing a thorough bibliography, limits nearly all his citations to ancient sources; surprisingly little scholarship is cited. This will be a problem for those who think that the work of scholarship should be made visible to students.[4] Because of this, and because of McKirahan’s tendency to isolate the sophists from broader trends in intellectual culture, I would have students who are serious about pursuing research on the sophists start elsewhere.
Notes
[1] See, e.g., Rachel Barney (2006), “The Sophistic Movement,” in A Companion to Ancient Philosophy, edited by Mary Louise Gill and Pierre Pellegrin (Blackwell), 77–97. Barney argues that the sophistic movement possesses “dialectical unity: the unity of a debate or tradition” (p. 94).
[2] See now Håkan Tell (2023), “The Professional Lives of the Sophists,” in The Cambridge Companion to the Sophists, edited by Joshua Billings and Christopher Moore (Cambridge), 98–123.
[3] McKirahan nevertheless includes a translation of Dissoi Logoi in the appendix because he finds it to be an excellent example of antilogic. Yet, in his chapter on antilogic (Ch. 10), he says only that while there is no reason to think a sophist wrote the Dissoi Logoi, it may have been a homework exercise for a sophist’s student (p. 111).
[4] I note that other titles in the series, such as James Warren’s The Presocratics (BMCR 2008.8.41) and Han Baltussen’s The Peripatetics (BMCR 2017.8.43), include robust scholarly references in the footnotes.