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  • 6 - The Turn to Language

  • from Part II - Thought
  • 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 179-199

  • Summary

    This chapter discusses the importance of rhetoric to the rise of the Sophists and the way that an attention to language as such conduces to a novel and controversial understanding of reality. Language, for the Sophists, is more than a medium for conveying meaning; it is itself creative of meaning, making the education that they offer uniquely powerful. This is the fuller sense of their professing to make their students “clever at speaking” (deinos legein). The chapter traces three specific areas on which the Sophists brought to bear their interest in logos: grammar and the issue of the correct names; the criticism of and engagement with poetry; and rhetoric and the effectiveness of argumentative techniques. We see that these explorations cannot be said to aim at a systematic theory. But they helped to inaugurate the study of language for its own sake, a topic that would play an important role in the philosophical debates of the following centuries.