Practice question · Match the pairs
Match each Sophist or term to what it is associated with.
- Protagoras
- Gorgias
- Nomos
- Physis
- Human convention, which could have been otherwise
- Three theses culminating in incommunicability
- Man is the measure of all things
- Nature, which holds regardless of agreement
Hints
- Two entries are people and two are the terms of their central distinction.
- One term covers whatever varies between cities.
Show the answer
- Protagoras → Man is the measure of all things
- Gorgias → Three theses culminating in incommunicability
- Nomos → Human convention, which could have been otherwise
- Physis → Nature, which holds regardless of agreement
Why
The two named figures and the two terms together make up the Sophistic contribution: a relativist thesis, a rhetorical tour de force, and the distinction that founded political philosophy.
Practise The Sophists
The app has 3 more questions on this lesson, and keeps your place in the course. Philosophy I is free to start.
More questions on The Sophists
- Why does Plato have a particular motive to distinguish Socrates sharply from the Sophists?
- Sort each arrangement by whether the Sophists would classify it as nomos or physis.
- Which are genuine contributions of the Sophists?
- Protagoras’ claim that man is the measure of all things is compatible, on its strong reading, with there…
- Arrange these steps in the reasoning that made the Sophists influential in Athens.
- The Sophists shifted philosophical inquiry from physis (nature) to nomos (human convention). What follows…
- Complete the account of the Sophists’ central distinction.