This is part eight of the series A History of the Western Thought. This is the final video covering the Pre-Socratic era, in which I explain the school known as the Sophists.
A very good picture of the ideas of the sophists is given by Pyrrhus Ilios, who was an ancient Hellene philosopher and founder of the philosophical movement of the skeptics. The philosophers of this movement are considered to be the continuation of the sophists, as they adopt their relativism. Therefore, according to Pyrrhus (and therefore according to the sophists), nothing can be in itself morally good or bad, beautiful or infamous, right or wrong as human behavior is governed by conventionality, that is, from the established habit and custom. In other words, they believed that an individual's beliefs depended on the customs, religion, institutions, and laws of the environment in which it was raised. As a result, nobody can think objectively.
I'm here mainly to understand why Marcus Aurelius despised the Sophists so much, and it's very much understandable how someone who held introspection so dearly as Marcus Aurelius did, would not sympathize much with what amounts to some very *sophisticated* etiquete coaches.
Hi Dr. Cooper, great vid. I’m currently interested in any parallels between the Sophists and post modernists of today. Could you give a quick expansion on the way, in your view, the subjectivism and relativism found in the 2 groups differ from each other?
Pastor Cooper, Please add the episode numbers to the titles of the videos in this series. Right now the Search can't differentiate between the eight episodes.
Certain things are deemed true by some people and not too others some people call this nihilism but that doesn’t mean or shouldn’t mean objective fact doesn’t exist
The arguments presented to illustrate relativism and relative truth are interesting, as they are inherently flawed. The claim is made that one's perception of hot may be to another cold, but this ignores the fact that there is still a measurable amount of heat present at one time. Experience is unique to each person, and opinions are certainly relative, but no matter if 72 degrees F is hot or cold to you, there is still an exact amount of heat energy present. If you were to claim that there is no (none, non-existent) absolute truth, then you would be making an absolute truth claim; thus, you have defeated your own assertion. "Is There Absolute Truth?" by Mark Spence - ru-vid.com/video/%D0%B2%D0%B8%D0%B4%D0%B5%D0%BE-7lvSGCaicEg.html
if you believe in truth you are religious by semantic default truth is, like logic and mathematics, a property of language otherwise thanks for the video
