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