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    Sophism is a Ancient Greek philosophy. The name comes from the sophists - ancient Greek teachers.

    Beliefs[edit | edit source]

    Views vary among Sophists, but the main views include:

    Religion[edit | edit source]

    The teachings of most sophists conflicted with religious ideas. Most of the sophists adhered to atheistic or agnostic views. Protagoras was an agnostic and gained the reputation of an atheist. In his essay “On the Gods” he wrote: “About the gods I cannot know either that they exist or that they do not exist. For many things prevent one from knowing (this): both the obscurity (of the question) and the brevity of human life.”

    Some sophists (Theodore of Cyrene, who even received the nickname “the atheist,” and Diagoras of Melos) directly denied the existence of gods. A reward was placed on Diagoras' head - he divulged the mystery of the Eleusinian mysteries. Prodicus of Keos saw the origins of religion in the veneration of wine, bread, rivers, the sun, etc. - that is, everything useful to people. In “Sisyphus,” Critias writes that religion is a human invention that serves to ensure that smart people force stupid people to follow the laws.

    Moral Relativism[edit | edit source]

    Sophists substantiate the right of a person to look at the world around him through the prism of his interests and goals. Protagoras was the first to put forward a theory according to which the cultivation of virtue is possible. He believed that there are two levels of laws: natural and social-moral.

    Some sophists believed that morality is an innate quality of a person, although it manifests itself late. Hence their negative attitude towards existing morality as incapable of being true. They equate the artificial and the unnatural. As a result, a point of view appears about the conditionality of the laws of morality and society for humans. Accordingly, a person’s moral behavior consists, first of all, in compliance with generally accepted norms of behavior.

    The sophists made an important observation characterizing the specificity of moral norms as norms encoding unnatural social relations between people. Their violation is associated with shame and punishment only if this violation is noticed by other people. If it is not noticed, then the violator is in no danger. In the Greek polis there was no separation between private and civil life. The law of virtue was equal to the law of the polis. Man was, first of all, a citizen of the polis, therefore, as a moral subject, he was a public person. It was not hypocrisy, because alone with himself he ceased to be moral

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    Further Information[edit | edit source]

    https://iep.utm.edu/sophists/

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