The chapter argues that the antecedents of Greek philosophical interest in logical argumentation can be found in the late-fifth-century sophistical practice and teaching of technê logôn or “the art of arguments.” It assembles the extant evidence for the teaching of technê logôn by figures such as Protagoras, Gorgias, Antisthenes, Antiphon, Prodicus, Socrates, and the author of the Dissoi Logoi. Original and provocative features of technê logôn taught by these figures include: (i) the ability to produce opposing arguments on both sides of any question (antilogiai); (ii) the ability to refute any given position or argument; (iii) the ability to skillfully question another person, or to answer such questioning, on any topic; and (iv) the subject-neutral ability to produce arguments on any subject. These features would later become important elements in what fourth-century philosophers would call “dialectic,” “rhetoric,” and other successors to the fifth century “art of argument.”

The chapter presents the Sophists’ more original contributions to political thought and shows how some of their ideas, which were often developed in the course of their practice as advisors or pedagogues, influenced the work of the two major philosophers of the next generation, Plato and Aristotle. The chapter’s first section shows the debt of early theorizing on constitutions to the Sophists’ practice of antilogia or debate but also to the discussions about democracy that mark Athenian intellectual life in the last decades of the fifth century, and shows how such theorizing provides the springboard for Plato’s pursuit for the best constitution. Its second section focuses on the criticism of law and argues that (despite what continues to be a dominant interpretation in the study of Sophistic thinking) such criticism should not be understood as a threat to morality but rather as constructive reflection on the nature and the limits of legislation.