PYTHAGORAS TO PLATO sophism was disarmed essentially by Plato in his dialogue appropriately named The Sophist.19 The second sophism involves a fallacious form of argument that sometimes occurs in Plato himself Aristotle’s logic, however, made clear to subsequent thinkers that ‘Not all As are B’ does not entail ‘No B is an A’ The third argument, from the privacy of experience, was not given its deWnitive quietus until the work of Wittgenstein in the twentieth century Beside Protagoras, Hippias, Prodicus, and Gorgias there were other sophists whose names and reputations have come down to us There was Callicles, for instance, the champion of the doctrine that might is right; and Thrasymachus, the debunker of justice as the self-interest of those in power There were Euthydemus and Dionysidorus, a pair of logic choppers who would oVer to prove to you that your father was a dog These men, however, and even the better-known sophists whom we have considered, are known to us primarily as characters in Plato’s dialogues Their philosophical contentions are best studied in the context of those dialogues Searching for the historical truth about the sophists is no more rewarding than trying to discover what King Lear or Prince Hamlet were like before Shakespeare got hold of them We shall say goodbye, therefore, to these sophists and turn to consider Socrates, who, according to one view, was the greatest of the sophists, and according to another, was a paradigm of the true philosopher at the opposite pole from any kind of sophistry Socrates In the history of philosophy Socrates has a place without parallel On the one hand, he is revered as inaugurating the Wrst great era of philosophy, and therefore, in a sense, philosophy itself In textbooks all previous thinkers are lumped together in textbooks as ‘Presocratics’, as if philosophy prior to his age was somehow prehistoric On the other hand, Socrates left behind no writing, and there is hardly a single sentence ascribed to him that we can be sure was his own utterance rather than a literary creation of one of his admirers Our Wrst-hand acquaintance with his philosophy is less 19 see Ch below 32