Practice question · Multiple choice
The Sophists shifted philosophical inquiry from physis (nature) to nomos (human convention). What follows from opening political arrangements to this distinction?
Hints
- If a rule is not anchored in nature, does that make it necessarily invalid, or merely mutable?
- What happens to the authority of a tradition once it is understood as a collective choice?
Show the answer
B. They are revealed as human choices capable of being revised
Why
Treating social customs as nomos does not automatically invalidate them or demand a return to nature; it simply strips them of cosmic inevitability. Because human agreements could have been otherwise, they are subject to critique, justification, and reform.
Practise The Sophists
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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…
- Match each Sophist or term to what it is associated with.
- Arrange these steps in the reasoning that made the Sophists influential in Athens.
- Complete the account of the Sophists’ central distinction.