Harry Pollard wrote:
>
> Keith,
>
> In my lighter moments I regard myself as a kind of neo-sophist. The
> sophists were likely to say to their earnest contemporaries - 'You know no
> more today than you did yesterday, so why are you still discussing it?' So,
> in that spirit, I would say that we know perhaps all we will ever know
> about a the possibility of a Supreme Being.
>
> So, all right already!
[snip]
After Plato, we know not too much about the Sophists.
It looks like some were con-artists teaching con-artistry,
and some (like Protagoras?) were more like American Pragmatists,
teaching how to lead a good life in society.
One thing they probably would all have agreed on would be
that individual human beings have to choose how they will
live and that there is no G-d or Eternal Forms to tell
each of us how to live. So maybe they were all
proto-"existentialists".
Calling oneself a "neo-sophist", I think, could mean one is
a con-artist [e.g., a neo-liberal economist...], or that one
is a democratic socialist [e.g., a John Dewey...],
or probably a number of other
things.
Man is the measurer of all things.
(--Protagoras, with a slight emendation
to make sense of Plato's quots of him)
"Yours in discourse...." (which was probably a more serious
human praxis for Protagoras than for Plato, since Plato
already knew all the answers, and Socrates may have been
Jacques Derrida in a "time warp")
\brad mccormick
--
Let your light so shine before men,
that they may see your good works.... (Matt 5:16)
Prove all things; hold fast that which is good. (1 Thes 5:21)
<![%THINK;[SGML+APL]]> Brad McCormick, Ed.D. / [EMAIL PROTECTED]
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