Knowledge of the ideas of the Sophists comes mainly from Plato and is also due, to a large extent, the pejorative content of that name. The Sophists were thinkers who lived in ancient Greece from the middle of the 5th century to the early 4th century BC.
The oldest sophist was Protagoras of Abdera. He was the first to call himself a sophist or teacher of wisdom. His discipline was based on the principle of relativism that refers everything to human measure. He conceives things only as phenomena perceived by man; in this way he forced to recognize the abstract character of the first elements of geometry, since it only applies to ideal figures.
Sophism represents the end of the so-called cosmological period, in which the concern of knowledge focuses on nature and the beginning of the anthropological period, centered on man. The objective of the sophists was to train young people, who they considered necessary, to dedicate themselves to politics.
Sophism was also distinguished from Greek philosophy by its method, since although ancient philosophy did not exclude empirical observation, it was typically deductive, which means that once the sage had a general constitutive principle of the world, he had to explain the phenomena concrete. While the sophists tried to gather a large number of observations of particular facts to draw conclusions, both theoretical and practical, being their empirical inductive method.
Se puede decir sin lugar a dudas que la noción de sofista estaba cambiando con el tiempo. Inicialmente, el sofista se dedicó a la enseñanza y la instrucción: Sin embargo, desde las posiciones de Platón, Sócrates y otros sabios, comenzaron a asociar el engaño sofístico. Por lo tanto, uno puede tomar la definición de sofista como alguien que, usando sofisterías y falacias, engaña a las personas y obtiene un ingreso de su habilidad para confundir al otro a través de sus argumentos.
