Marina Volf

The philosophical nature of the two versions of paraphrasing the Gorgias’ treatise On Non-Being — the skeptical version by Sextus Empiricus and the peripatetic version by an anonymous author — are discussed. The paper gives a comparative analysis of the arguments upheld by the informants enunciating Gorgias’ thoughts, demonstrates the range of philosophical problems, which Gorgias considered, judging by the reports of his speech, and shows how both versions add to and clarify each other in terms of philosophical issues. The work provides insights as to how Gorgias modernizes and transforms the initial attitudes of Parmenides, shifting the reasoning plan: from how thought can be directed to an object and the qualities of this object to how thought can be directed to the non-existent. Accordingly, the problems of intentionality in the Gorgias’ teaching are considered as well as the privileged status of any of mental states, the nature of word or speech as an autonomous way to develop knowledge about external objects, the issue of meaning as a reference, and inter-subjectivity in cognition. A conclusion is reached that giving preference to one of the paraphrasing versions impoverishes our understanding of the Gorgias’ teaching considerably, while the joint analysis of both versions demonstrates the engagement of the sophistic issues raised by Gorgias, in the philosophical and, particularly, the epistemological paradigm of the ancient as well as modern philosophy.

The Sophistry, not a school in any ordinary sense, set new pedagogical standards in Greek educational practice, being as it were the highest stage of educational system. Two innovations of the sophistic education are of special interest: first, its professionalism, which presupposes a systematic transfer of specialized knowledge and includes such forms of “in-calls” learning as lectures and discussion in small groups and, second, the appearance of special rhetorical handbook or written manuals, actively used in the class.

In traditional interpretations, ancient Sophistic is labeled as relativism. According to them, Plato and Aristotle refer Protagoras' doctrine to philosophically inconsistent perceptual relativism. Plato offers two interpretations of relativism, and one of them, so called "secret doctrine" of Protagoras, is often marked as Plato’s own theory of perceptions. Despite the fact that the exoteric and esoteric versions of Protagorean doctrine contains fully valid epistemic and ontological ideas, they are attributed philosophical failure to them because of the self-refutation thesis contained in them, and, according to Aristotle's version, its subjectivism. Subjectivism can also be attributed to Gorgias with regard to his categorial distinction of abilities and objects of perception. However, criticizing subjectivism, Aristotle himself uses a similar categorial argument. Both interpretations undermined the reliance of the Sophistic, having made relativism one of the negative markers of it. Modern rehabilitating interpretations of the Sophistic either seek ways to eliminate subjectivism and skepticism from the sophistic doctrines, or avoid using modern terminology, also they should take into account that fact that in the contemporary philosophy there is no such concept as «simply relativism», but there are various, sometimes contradictory, interpretations of it, and in this case, they have to make an adjustment to the current context in which negative interpretations of relativism have long been not popular.

The paper discusses the peculiarities of the analytic approach to the history of Ancient philosophy in the context of other, more popular approaches and genres. This approach is based on finding out an implicit argumentation and problems in the philosophical texts, and establishing logical connections between them. The paper also considers the perspectives of application of this approach to patristic texts. In addition, it shows the necessity of formalization and symbolization in the analytic history of philosophy.