Socrates Pt.1

Many Athenians had mistaken Socrates for a Sophist. The fact is that Socrates was one of the Sophists' keenest critics. That Socrates should have been identified with them was due to his relentless analysis of any and every subject, a technique employed also by the Sophists. But between the Sophists and Socrates there was a fundamental difference. The Sophists split hairs to show that equally good arguments could be advanced on either side of any issue. They were skeptics who doubted that there could be any certain or reliable knowledge. Moreover, they concluded that since all knowledge is relative, moral ideas and ideals are also relative. Socrates, on the other hand, had a different motivation for his constant argumentation. He was committed to the pursuit of truth and considered it his mission to seek out the basis for stable and certain knowledge. He was also attempting to discover the foundation for the good life. As he pursued his mission, Socrates devised a method for arriving at truth, linking knowing and doing to each other in such a way as to argue that to know the good is to do good, that "knowledge is virtue". Unlike the Sophists, then, Socrates engaged in argumentation, in "dialectic," not for ends destructive of truth or to develop pragmatic skills among lawyers and politicians, but to achieve creative concepts of truth and goodness.