In the middle of the fifth century BC, Greece began a revolution of knowledge, which coincided with the peak of Athenian democracy, the rise of civil rights, the growth of individualism and the demand for solving practical problems, which led to a rethinking of the old way of thinking. As a result, some Greek philosophers abandoned the study of the material world in favor of the relationship between the individual and society, and the advocates of the new intellectual tendency first recommended the ancient Greek sophists.
The original meaning of the word sophist was originally the Greek word for wise man. The term seems to be a joking name for them by their opponents. According to the available records, the vast majority of our knowledge of sophists comes from Plato, the most severe critic of sophists, who are often regarded as enemies of the entire Greek cultural elite, and whose extreme remarks about man and the world are necessarily unacceptable in modern society. Some scholars of this school of thought really lack a sense of social responsibility, and they are unscrupulous in doing wrong things while pretending to be good people.
Protagra was a representative of the sophists, who lectured mainly in Athens, and his famous aphorism that man is the measure of all things, summed up the essence of the philosophy of the school of sophistism, according to which he believed that truth, goodness and beauty are relative to human needs and interests, and that there is no absolute truth and fairness, and there is no eternal standard. Since sensation is the only source of knowledge, there can only be specific and valid truths in a given time and space; Morality also varies from person to person, because God does not have an absolutely immutable standard for all situations in the world.
Later, some sophists far surpassed Protagra in attainment, and the sophists' representative, Seresimachus, distorted sophistry to mean that all laws and customs are but the expression of the will of the most shrewd, for their own benefit, and therefore the most shrewd** are the most unjust, who are above the law and only care to satisfy their own desires. These views undoubtedly had a major impact on the minds of conservative people, and they were one of the reasons why other schools of thought were attacking them.
However, there is much to praise in the doctrines of sophists and even the most extreme elements. The sophists denounced slavery and the xenophobia of the Greeks. Some of the sophists were fighters for liberal civil rights and practical progress, and most importantly, sophists broadened the field of philosophy to include not only physics and metaphysics, but also ethics and political science from now on. As Cicero in Roman times said, sophists brought philosophy from heaven to earth.