doctrine of number, might seem to present a parallel, but it is doubtful that
the generation of Pythagoras himself viewed numbers in other than concrete
terms; the doctrine of the numerical Forms is not clearly visible until four
generations later, with Plato, although it may have emerged in the Pythagorean
school itself in the intervening period.
Within Heraclitus’ lifetime, Parmenides also crossed the border to a higher
level of philosophical abstraction. His famous monism, based on logical argu-
ments that Being cannot be itself if it admits of differentiation or change, is
clearly a response to the element theories, and likely to Heraclitus as well
(Guthrie, 1961–1982: 2:23–24). With this, the internal structure of the intel-
lectual community was well launched on its autonomous path. Parmenides
posed a puzzle—speaking more strictly, a deep trouble—for intellectuals to
work upon. He thereby carved out a distinctive space that no longer owed
anything to popular religious conceptions. Henceforward, when the border
between philosophy and religion became salient, the philosophers would have
their own autonomous contribution to make, and indeed could generate their
own philosophical religions. Heraclitus too, with his concept of logos, provided
an abstract tool that could be bent to many uses in this internal struggle within
the intellectual world.
External factors impinged again on this increasingly complex intellectual
community. The next two generations saw further democratic revolutions, the
geopolitical upheavals of the Persian wars and their aftermath of Athenian
imperialism. These events sent ambassadors and refugees traveling around the
Greek world. In this milieu appeared traveling Sophists, typically men not as
well based in private fortunes and political position as the earlier pre-Socratics.
The search for livelihood was one impetus for the emergence of education for
fees, and hence for the rise of the professional teacher and the organized school
(Kerford, 1981). Political issues of the surrounding social milieu are prominent
in the Sophists’ doctrines, especially their discussions of nomos (law, custom)
versus physis (nature), and of the source of moral and legal obligation. The
Sophists became famous for teaching how to argue on either side of a question,
making a living by selling a practical skill useful to citizens in the participatory
law courts of the democratic city-states. But the Sophists were also heirs to
internal developments in the intellectual community. They argued on the level
of abstract principles, not concrete cases, and religious reifications for them
were a thing of the past. Part of their shocking effect on laypeople was that they
were an intellectual avant-garde; they attracted the usual hostility of laypersons
whose loyalty was attached to reified sacred objects, directed against cosmo-
politans operating at a higher level of abstraction.
The Sophists carved out a new stance within the intellectual field. This was
the technique of deliberately playing at paradoxes, of confronting other intel-
86 •^ The Skeleton of Theory