[MD] The trouble with Sophists

[david buchanan]

Ron said to dmb:
... Relativism seems to hold a particularly strong point of view within the context of empiricism so much so that it created a real problem for these philosophers, the Sophists really had their panties in a bunch over the seemingly air tight case that all is relative and in flux. How can we ever know anything with any kind of certainty? We can't. So only through careful inquirey, through collection and division through the dialectic and through reflection apon the consequences of each hypothisis should we ever hope to gain a more precise understanding of the concepts and subject matter. ...


dmb says:
Hmmm. As I understand it, Plato slandered the Sophists by calling them relativists. It was Plato that had his panties in a bunch over the notion that all is relative. Plato insisted on a fixed and eternal truth whereas the Sophists said reality just isn't like that. As I understand it, Heraclitus said you can't stand in the same river twice, which is a metaphor for the idea that reality is fundamentally about flux and change, and Zeno "proved" that motion and change were impossible and all appearances to the contrary are illusions. And so the main camps in philosophy sort of pivot around these two rival visions; the empirical flux and fixed eternal Ideas. 


Ron commented:
Right, again we see him stating that cultural assumptions (opinion) ta endoxa as the starting point of reasoning is an imitation of reason. And that method of collection and division, the is and is not of the matter, Dialectic, I contend, is a radically empirical method of gaining a more precise meaning of a concept.


dmb says:

As I understand it, the dialectical method is contrasted with the empirical method. It is the method of choice for those who do not trust the senses and therefore believe that logic and reason is the only road to truth. Thus they talk instead of observe, investigate or experiment. This is rationalism and it's opposed to empiricism. As you pointed out, Ron, "they saw empirical reality as subjective and ... based upon cultural bias and opinion. Relativism had them stymied." This, I think, is what Pirsig would be talking about when he says that Plato slandered them. These are the reasons they give for distrusting empirical methods.


Ron continued:
 but.....we can see..that like Pirsig...these philosophers understood that truth was a love of wisdom a passion for the precise and accurate the highest virtue. And this is what Aristotle really took up and expanded apon in scientific inquiry and method. The Pythagoreans on the other hand went precisely the way you state toward a vicious intellectualism and they really influenced Plato's latter work so much so that it's really difficult to see the great contributions to Pragmatism Plato made in earlier writ.



dmb says:

Yes, as Plato construed it, there are three basic types of people and they correspond pretty neatly with the MOQ's biological, social and intellectual levels. Plato talked about these three types as the lovers of pleasure, the lovers of honor and the lovers of truth or wisdom. The pleasure seekers are hedonists. They like what the pastry chefs and prostitutes have to offer. The lovers of honor want fame and fortune and power. Then there are the philosophers, whose love is of a higher order. But Plato stops there and associates all things good and divine with the intellect. He was a very ungroovy dude.

Now Socrates, on the other hand, he gets real close to what Pirsig is saying in Plato's Phaedrus. His description of the soul, Pirsig says in ZAMM, is pretty much what he means by DQ.