1. Précis 5
Nate Ward
11/18/14
Paul Woodruff provides an overview of sophist thought and works to deflate
Plato’s criticism of Protagoras and Gorgias, thus placing them, and the other sophists, on
more level footing with the other pre-Socratic philosophers.1 Towards this end, Woodruff
teases out two key sophistic concepts from the extant writings of Gorgias and Protagoras,
Eikos and Eubolia, and frames much of his discussion around said concepts. Eikos is
essentially appealing to what is reasonable to expect in a given situation, and eubolia is
the exercise of good judgment required to determine what is and is not reasonable in a
given situation (p. 297-298). The sophists taught reasoning based upon the combination
of these concepts.
Woodruff provides an informative outline of Plato’s negative criticisms of the
sophists (p. 290-291). Plato thought it ludicrous that any two arguments could be equally
correct; he (incorrectly) inferred that the sophists thought eikos identical to truth, but
Woodruff claims that eikos only amounts to “an admittedly risky method for exploring
the truth when the available evidence will not support ascertainable conclusions”; it is not
a replacement of truth (p. 296). Reasoning based upon eikos depends upon the “good
judgment and experience of those who use it”, as well as “the relevance of the
information that frames it”, in essence what is reasonable, i.e. eikos, is relative to
1 Woodruff, Paul. "Rhetoric and Relativism: Protagoras and Gorgias." The Cambridge
Companion to Early Greek Philosophy. By A. A. Long. Cambridge: Cambridge UP,
1999. 290-310. Print.

2. background information changing, hence eubolia, i.e. good judgment, is required (p. 297-
298).
Woodruff argues that sophistic thought was grounded upon a naturalistic
methodology and is not radically relativistic (save Protagoras, perhaps) or skeptical.
Woodruff asserts that nature is correlated with knowledge similar to how convention is
correlated with opinion, and he argues that since nature is uniform (in that all humans
experience it) any appeals rooted in nature defy relativism automatically; it also neatly
avoids skepticism (p. 304). Woodruff asserts that one of the defining features of sophistic
thought “is their commitment to human nature as a subject of study” (p. 305). For the
sophists, nature enables humans to “maintain reasonable expectations towards and of one
another”; in essence, nature is what grounds eikos and eubolia (p. 309).
Woodruff reiterates Plato’s belief that the sophists were not experts; they had
“little more than the ability to mimic experts” (p. 307). Woodruff sketches two responses
to this, noting that “if they are coherent in thought and practice, then they must believe
they could be teachers without having knowledge”, (p. 307). Woodruff argues that a
“Gorgian answer” would be that his aim was not to teach anything specific; it was only to
teach the nonspecific practice of rhetoric (p. 307-308). Woodruff points out that all
Protagoras claims to teach is “the good sense to ask pertinent questions and recognize
relevant information”, which is to say that eikos does not require any special knowledge
of a given matter, only eubolia. Hence, Protagoras is a teacher insofar as he teaches how
to sharpen ones judgment, he need not teach any specialized information to be a teacher
(p. 308-309).