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| | The Sophists-Ethics-CCRI (Site not responding. Last check: 2007-09-08) |
 | | century BCE, the term sophists and the group it designated became a term of disrepute, disapproval, and dismissal. |
 | | It signified a cheat or charlatan, a fraud, a pretender to wisdom only, someone interested in personal success rather than truth and ethical principle; a verbal trickster who plays games with language and argument, arming demagogues with powerful rhetorical weapons; a philosophical relativist, skeptic, and atheist. |
 | | In contrast, the Sophists turned their attention to the world of human affairs: ethics, politics, rhetoric, language, argument, statesmanship, business, law, etc. As such, they effect a reflective turn in the history of Greek philosophy and culture, a problematization of the human world in general. |
| faculty.ccri.edu /paleclerc/ethics/sophists.shtml (741 words) |
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