一坨廢紙

Itinerant teachers who thirved in Athens in fifth and early fourth centuries B.C.E. From the term”Sophist”come the words”sophistry,”or specious argument, and”sophisticated,” with its connotation of clever glibness;but the Greek word sophistes denoted merely the master of a craft, a clever adept, or a wise man.

公元前5世纪至公元前4世纪早期波形与雅典的巡回教师。从“智者”这个属于引申出指似是而非的辩论的“诡辩”一词，以及暗指聪明油滑的“世故”一词。但希腊语中“智者”一词仅表示掌握某种技艺的人、聪明的老手、或有智慧的人。

The Sophists were the first philosophers to teach for pay, a practice that earned them the scorn of Socrates, who believed it was one’s duty to freely impart knowledge. They taught whatever was wanted by their patrons, from grammer and linguistic analysis to mathematics to techniques for success in public life. But they were, above all, rhetoricians, skilled in rational argument, and it was their reputed willingness to argue either side of a proposition with equal force that spawned their enduring reputation of deceptive reasoning.

智者派是第一批为报酬而授课的哲学家，这种行为让她们遭到了苏格拉底的蔑视，苏格拉底认为哲学家的责任是免费传播知识。出资人想学什么他们就教什么，包括语法、语义分析、数学以及在公共生活中成功的技巧。但是他们亦不过是长于理性辩论的修辞学家。他们那据说是可以就一个论点的正反两面同时争辩的干劲导致了他们抹不去的欺骗性推理的名声。

In their thought, Sophists were more interested in human nature, politics, and society than in the search for the nature of ultimate reality, which occupied the predeccessors and comtemporaries, including Plato. There was no uniform Sophists philosophy, but they tended to reallism and empiricism,in contrast to those who saw life governed by an intrinsic ideal. They also believed, and undertook to prove, that civic virtue could be taught, with radical implication that almost anyone could participate in politics and public life.

智者派的思想对人的本性、政治和社会更感兴趣，而不是像较前的与同时期的哲学家（包括柏拉图）一样执迷于寻找自然的终极实在。相比于认为生命由内在理念所决定的哲学家，智者派没有什么正式的哲学，但是他们倾向于现实主义和经验主义。他们也相信并着手去证明通过强烈的影响可以来教授城邦美德，这样几乎所有人都可以参与到政治和公共生活中去。

Foremost among the Sophists was Protagoras, best known for his dictum”Man is the measure of all things”—that is, the qualities of things are determingd as much or more by our perceptions of them as by anything innate in them. He illustrated this with the parable of the wind. One person feels a wind to be warm, another feels it tobe cold; since it cannot be both hot and cold at once, they cannot both be feeling the same wind, unless, of course, these qualities are only subjective.

智者派中最著名的要数普罗太戈拉，以其箴言“人是万物的尺度”而闻名，也就是说，事物的特性甚至更取决于我们对其感知的程度，如同本来就存在一样。他用风的寓言证明了这个论断。一个人觉得风热，另一个人觉得风冷，因为风不能同时热或冷，两个人所感觉到的也不可能是同一缕风，除非风的特性是主观的。

The view that has been distilled in the phrase”might makes right”is credited to the Sophists Thrasymachus and Callicles. They appear in Plato’s Republic and Gorgias, respectively, where they argue that”justice”is established by whoever is strong enough to enforce it; self-interest is therefore the only rational course and compulsion the only reason for obediece to authority.

被总结为“强权即真理”的观点应归功于瑟拉西马库斯和克里托。他们分别在柏拉图的《理想国》和《高尔吉亚篇》中出现过，他们认为“正义”是由任何强大到可以使由之的人所建立的；因此自立是唯一理性的做法，而强迫是服从于权威的唯一原因。