Sophistry as Safemindedness in the Protagoras

Abstract

Concluding the book, this chapter focuses its resolution on the premise of how hedonism should or should not be policed as it occurs in Socrates’s and Protagoras’s debate. Having made it deliberately difficult to resolve epistemologically the nature of the good, Socrates endeavors to “win” the debate over how to encourage hedonists to search for good by applying Protagoras’s own principles. Using the structural reading from earlier in the book as well as the notions of literary performance enumerated in chapters six through eight, Socrates ends by linking himself inextricably to Protagoras, that instead of searching for a winner, a reader or interlocutor should instead search for the “atopoi” that has resulted from their dialogue.