Book Club: Early Socratic Dialogues, 6, Hippias Major and what it means when something is “fine”

[Hippias the Sophist]

One of the features of my writings here is a book club, where I invite readers to follow me, chapter by chapter, through selected books ranging across a variety of topics in philosophy or science. So far I have covered Paul Feyerabend’s Philosophy of Nature, Julian Baggini’s The Edge of Reason, Harry Frankfurt’s On Inequality, and Kevin Laland’s Darwin’s Unfinished Symphony. The current series concerns Early Socratic Dialogues, edited by Trevor J. Saunders (here is the book), and this is the 6th instalment (we have two more to go, after which, new book!).

The Hippias Major (just like its Minor counterpart, to which we will turn next time) is named, yet again, after a Sophist: Hippias of Elis (image above), a younger contemporary of both Protagoras and Socrates. The primary reason Plato wrote so often about the Sophists was not in order to give a detailed refutation of their mode of philosophizing, but to defend the memory of Socrates. Plato thought that a major reason for the trial of 399 BCE that led to the execution of his teacher was that he was confused, in popular understanding, with the Sophists.

Originally the term “Sophist” was not a disparaging one, it just meant teacher. These were itinerant instructors, who would make demonstrative “displays” of their art, hoping to attract good paying pupils from the upper classes, to whom they would teach knowledge of some specialized field or other. Plato disliked them for a couple of reasons: their being overly concerned with money (everyone’s gotta make a living, but within reason), and especially the fact that they were teaching rhetoric, not philosophy. They appeared not to be interested in discovering and communicating truth, but in allowing people to defend whatever position happened to suit them at the moment.

The Hippias Major is one of the aporetic dialogues, in which Socrates inquires on the meaning of a particular philosophical term, but his quest ends in “aporia,” or confusion. He manages not to find an answer to the question, but rather to discard a series of proposed answers, usually while at the same time showing that one or more of his interlocutors are far less wise than they seem to think they are.