Bernard Knox, in Humanities (July-Aug. 1991), National Endowment for the Hu- Of Sophistry inanities, 1100 Pennsylvania Ave. N.w., Washington, D.C.
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Plato (427-347 B.c.) gave the Sophists a bad name, and it has persisted to this day. The denigration was quite undeserved, ob- serves Knox, a classics professor emeritus at Yale University. In fact, he says, the Sophists, who taught rhetoric in Athens during the fifth century B.c., were "the first professors of the humanities," and...