Hegel and the Sophists

Abstract

According to G. Kerferd it is Hegel who for the first time establishes a positive philosophical appreciation of sophistry. It is impossible to overestimate Hegel’s importance in terms of the determination of sophistry’s relation to philosophy, for in essence Hegel is the first philosopher who systematically absorbs sophistry into philosophy by according to it a positive relation to truth. As Kerferd points out, in his Lectures on the History of Philosophy, Hegel ‘restore[d] the sophists to an integral position in the history of Greek philosophy’.However this restoration is, Kerferd notes, ambiguous in its consequences. Hegel’s view of sophistry was influential throughout the nineteenth century, and even in the twentieth century it continued to shape interpretations and understandings of the sophists. But because those who took it up did not penetrate to the philosophical core of Hegel’s history of philosophy, they merely and externally repeated Hegel’s views, thus degrading and assimilating Hegel’s account to the prevalent and long-established view of the sophists.