The Sophists

Josh Billings and Christopher Moore join me in the Lesche to discuss the fifth-century BCE 'sophists', the subject of their new edited volume The Cambridge Companion to the Sophists.

Works and fragments of the 'sophists' are most easily accessible in:

André​ Laks, Glenn W. Most, Early Greek Philosophy. 9 volumes. Loeb Classical Library, 524-532​. Cambridge, MA; London: Harvard University Press, 2016.

Primary texts

Lots, but especially

• Works of the Presocratic philosophers
• Gorgias, Encomium of Helen and Defense of Palamedes
• Works of Plato
• Thucydides, History of the Peloponnnesian War
• Plays of Euripides

Also mentioned

• Kerferd, G.B., 1981, The Sophistic Movement, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

About our Guests

Josh Billings is Professor of Classics and Comparative Literature at Princeton University. His research centers on ancient Greek literature and philosophy and modern intellectual history, with a particular concentration on tragedy. He is the author of Genealogy of the Tragic: Greek Tragedy and German Philosophy (Princeton 2014) and The Philosophical Stage: Drama and Dialectic in Classical Athens (Princeton 2021).

Christopher Moore is a Professor of Philosophy and Classics at Penn State University. He has published three monographs focusing on topics in classical philosophy, principally on the form taken by early debates about eventually-canonical philosophical topics (self-knowledge, virtue, philosophy itself). He is currently completing a book on intellectual culture in the fifth century BCE.

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Thanks for joining us in the Lesche!

Podcast art: Daniel Blanco
Theme music: "The Song of Seikilos," recomposed by Eftychia Christodoulou using Sibelius

This podcast is made possible with the generous support of Brown University’s Department of Classical Studies and the John Nicholas Brown Center for Advanced Study.

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