politics; thus they tended to pride themselves on skill in arguing, without being clear what in this was
due to rhetorical tricks and what to serious philosophical points. Plato depicts them as pretentious, but
with little understanding of the techniques and arguments they manipulated; and although we are at a
disadvantage because of our dependence on the indirect tradition, we certainly get the impression that
they enjoyed the sheer exercise of raising logical puzzles and paradoxical statements without any strong
drive to get systematic understanding of them.
Their contribution -was not all negative, however; they developed what had hitherto been marginal in
philosophy: the study of ethics and politics. People making their livings by teaching the means of
success in a number of places were bound to pay attention to the differences between the political
institutions and ethical codes of various cities. Protagoras was most famous for drawing relativistic
conclusions from this; Plato in the Theaetetus presents the relativism of 'Protagoras' as undifferentiated
and confused, but we have no way of knowing how fair this is. It became also more and more
fashionable to claim that human institutions are a matter of nomos (law, rule, interpreted increasingly as
arbitrary convention) and not of physis (nature). The general idea is clear: human institutions, unlike the
laws of nature, can B.C. changed to serve different purposes. But so many different notions were
brought under the alluringly vague contrast that it came to bring more confusion than illumination.
Callicles in Plato's Gorgias is put forward as an example of someone who parades the contrast "without
meaning anything clear by it. Callicles illustrates also the widespread tendency to draw (largely
unjustified) amoralistic conclusions about nomos from its vaguely specified contrast with physis, and to
reject not only inherited customs but any kind of laws or norms as being merely arbitrary and deserving
no respect.
Socrates was thus aware of a philosophical tradition that had already become diverse and pluralist.
Traditional cosmology continued alongside the newer developments of ethics and the art of reasoning,
with some interest in metaphysics and the theory of knowledge. And, especially at Athens, personal
certainties had been shaken: not so much by awareness of alternative ways of life, which was hardly
new, but by a growing feeling that inarticulate tradition now needed reasoned defence. Respect for the
powers of argument created a demand that what was valued be argued for; but the respect was
indiscriminate, the nature of argument ill understood, and the result often confusion. Such was the state
of philosophy when it was, for a time, revolutionized by a powerful personality.
Socrates
Socrates (470-399) was an ordinary Athenian citizen belonging to no philosophical school; he may have
had an early interest in cosmology, but if so, he abandoned it. He wrote nothing, and our reports of him
come from sources (Plato, Xenophon, Aristophanes) that give widely divergent pictures. If our interest is
philosophical, however, we have no choice but to follow Plato; and although we have always to
remember that the Platonic Socrates is Plato's creation, we can form some idea of what it was about the
historical Socrates that led Plato to use him as the main spokesman for Platonic ideas. The most
important facts about Socrates were that he lived, uncompromisingly, for philosophy; and that he was
put to death on anti-intellectual grounds, the charges being that he introduced new divinities and
corrupted the youth. It is plausible that behind this lay unspoken political motives, since Socrates had