Sophistry and political philosophy: Protagoras’ challenge to Socrates

Abstract

Bartlett thus concludes that Protagoras's atheism is "unearned because unproven or merely posited."Because the sophistic response to the challenge of the prophets proves inadequate, the Theaetetus restores the enterprise of political philosophy against the challenge of relativism.Philosopher and prophet prove odd bedfellows in the fight against sophistry.Because Bartlett's study is an introduction, he concludes by declining to articulate the Socratic response to the challenge of the prophets, that is, how beneath this symbiosis Ues a deeper parasitism.From time to time, technical books dealing with such fields as mathematics, physics, anthropology, and the social sciences will be reviewed in this section, if it is thought that they might be of special interest to philosophers.