Abstract

The Sophists owe their place in the history of philosophy to Plato – but also their bad reputation. He uses them to profile his image of the philosopher against them. For him, sophistry is the ultimate in distance from philosophy while at the same time being close to philosophy; it is as related to this »as the wolf is to the dog«. I first trace the negative exaggeration of sophistry and the sophists in Plato, which is reflected in the ineradicable negative connotation of »sophist« and »sophistic«. The great intellectual-historical importance of the Sophists does not lie primarily in what they independently contributed to philosophy, but in the establishment of a conception of rhetoric as we encounter it in Isocrates, which became the most important educational institution in antiquity alongside and before philosophy.