The Sophists in Plato's Dialogues by Corey David D

Author:Corey, David D.
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: State University of New York Press

Meanwhile we are able to judge the psychopathological dangers of eristic pedagogy in the glee that Ctesippus experiences after winning a few rounds and in Clinias’ surprising pleasure in seeing the sophists receive their comeuppance. Clinias’ pleasure is surprising because the verbal death-blow that makes him laugh is not unlike the blows that nearly undid him earlier in the dialogue. And his laughter is indistinguishable from the earlier laughter of Euthydemus’ admirers. Clinias’ laughter thus betokens a contradiction in his own soul. Clinias enjoys seeing Ctesippus stick it to the sophists, but this is not a world in which a Clinias would fare well.

To see all this is perhaps the best endorsement possible of Socrates’ own protreptic approach. If it is a choice between Socrates’ aporia in which the structure of reality places constraints on what can be known, and the brothers’ eristic method, which repeatedly contradicts itself as it tries to submit the world and everything in it to the sophists’ will, who would not opt for aporia? Crito and Athenians like him may choose neither, especially if they do not take the necessary steps or possess the necessary acumen to distinguish them. But the choice for eristic would seem perverse in the extreme after the demonstration Socrates has just supplied. What will Crito make of Socrates’ elaborate and helpful narrative?

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