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  • 14 - The Sophists in the History of Philosophy

  • from Part III - Receptions
  • Edited by Joshua Billings, Princeton University, New Jersey, Christopher Moore, Pennsylvania State University
  • Book:
    The Cambridge Companion to the Sophists
    Published online:
    23 December 2023
    Print publication:
    19 October 2023, pp 403-437

  • Summary

    This chapter traces the modern reception of the Sophists from their rediscovery in the Latin West to the first edition of Hermann Diels’ Die Fragmente der Vorsokratiker (1903). Its focus is the Sophists’ uncertain place in the historiography of Greek philosophy, in relation both to the “Presocratics” and to Socrates and the Socratic tradition. The “Sophists” emerge as an historiographical category in the late eighteenth century and become pivotal in Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel’s (1770–1831) systematic account of philosophy’s development. Eduard Zeller (1814–1908), his key successor, revises but also reinforces the still dominant Hegelian narrative. The chapter also discusses two outsiders to the German historiographical tradition, George Grote (1794–1871) and Friedrich Nietzsche (1844–1900), who challenge the Sophists’ assimilation to progressivist views of Greek philosophy, but from radically different perspectives.