The sophists and political justice: “There is legislation about the eyes, what they must see and what not”

Philosophy

Abstract

For a certain stream of the theoretical thinking in Greece in 5th century B.C., there is typical dissolubility between natural and cosmological legitimating of morale, religion, policy, and culture. In the discussion, we follow the difference between texts which ground justice by natural and cosmological path, and others that describe the beginning of justice as political and cultural process. From this point of a view we read the Melian dialog by Thucydides, the speeches by Sophists in Plato’s The Republic and Protagoras, and a fragment of the sophist Antiphon. The notions of the political justice, as formed by the Sophists, are in parts similar to the modern theories of democracy (in Protagoras), social contract (in The Republic’s Glaucon), and the critique of authority (in Antiphon the Sophist).