>>>>The Sophists are a group of philosophers who come into Athens in the middle and the
second half of the 5th century BC, the great glory days of Athenian democracy. Sophist
means "teacher of wisdom." The Sophists are teachers who thrive in the atmosphere of Greek
democracy. They come and they teach rhetoric and they teach philosophy. Two pursuits that
are appropriate for a democratic society, in which the leaders of the society wanted
to train themselves and their sons in the arts of rhetoric and philosophy. The Sophists
are an intellectual movement, and they would raise fundamental questions about the nature
of morality and justice that have reverberated throughout the rest of human history. I'd
like to introduce a few of the concepts that underlie Sophistic philosophy and that would
provoke the reactions of Socrates, Plato and Aristotle, among others. And to do this let's
introduce a set of terms that would prove fundamental to Sophist thinking. The two terms
are nomos and physis. Greek words nomos and physis. Nomos means "law" or "custom." Physis
means "nature", it's where we get our world physical. It means "nature." And the Athens
of the 5th century was a cosmopolitan city, that it was it was open to external influences
philosophers and thinkers from around the world came to Athens. And it meant that the
Athenians who were also at this time building a naval empire, came into broad cultural contact
with the wider world. Now, in any human situation multiculturalism can be uncomfortable. It
can be provocative, because it forces one to encounter the ideas and the beliefs and
the cultural norms of another human being. The challenge of multiculturalism in the ancient
Greek world is embodied in this dualism between nomos custom or law and physis, nature. It's
a dualism that asks, what about our way of life is due simply to convention, we might
say, and what is due to nature? What is objective and natural? What is inherent in the way things
truly are and what is simply our creation? What is our custom? What is our culture given
to us? And it's something that, a dualism that can be invisible until one comes into
contact with other cultures. But this is part of the challenge of the Sophists, is that
they raise fundamentally the question of what about our social order is simply our conventional
way of doing things? And this challenge is embodied in a story that's preserved in the
"Histories" of Herodotus. Herodotus is the father of history in fact, history too is
a Greek word, it means "inquiry." And Herodotus comes to Athens in the glory days of Athenian
democracy where he pens his "Histories". And his "Histories" are not just an account of
the past going back to the great defeat of the Persians by the Greeks, but in fact, are
a sort of anthropological inquiry. They're an anthropologist's account of the foreign
cultures that surround the Greek world. Herodotus is as much an anthropologist and ethnographer
as he is a historian. He loves to look at other cultures and asks about their conventions.
And he tells the story of the Persian King Darius, who one day brought subjects of his
empire from the Far East and the Far West into his court and he brought together a set
of Greeks and asked them a simple question: would you consider eating the flesh of your
dead relatives? And the Greeks recoil in horror and say that's cannibalism, it's a violation
of the divine ordinances, it's a unholy act. And he brings together with these Greeks some
Indians subject to his empire, the Callations, and he asks them: would you ever consider
incinerating the bodies of your dead relatives? And they say this is an absolute desecration,
that it's a violation of the fundamental laws of god. And he had proven a point because
the Callations, so Herodotus says, considered it holy to consume the flesh of their dead
relatives. And the Greeks, of course in the classical world, practiced cremation. They
burned the bodies and buried the bones of their relatives. So he asks one culture would
they consider doing what this other culture considered simply normative. And it's the
question itself that's quite provocative because the Greeks suddenly in this situation are
forced to realize that their practices, these most sacred sorts of rituals are perhaps simply
convention. That is, what is it about this that makes it right? Is it simply something
we have created, or is it part of nature? Is it something about the order of the cosmos?
Is it nomos, convention, or is it physis? And the way this question is posed is part
of the challenge of the Sophists to traditional morality, because if not consuming the flesh
of your dead relatives is simply a convention, what else might be mere convention?