Eliza asked:

How did the Presocratics perceive soul? Is Plato's theory of ideas equivalent to religious faith? What
is a hypothesis? On what basis did Socrates adopt it ("Phaedo")? All philosophies take something for
granted to begin with, a base; but what did the Sophists have as a base? As nihilists of their time was
it power (e.g. political)?

============

Thales, the first Presocratic philosopher, is said to have explained the effect of a magnet on iron by
saying that it had a 'soul'. Heraclitus, who taught that the universe was an everlasting divine fire which
'kindles in measures, and goes out in measures' also held that each of us had this fire within us. It is
death to allow one's soul to become 'wet'.

Plato's theory of Ideas or 'Forms' is not a religion as you would understand it. There is no personal
God that we can pray to. it is a religion of reason. Heraclitus had identified the universal fire with
Logos— explanation, reason, account. Reason 'rules' over the ever-changing world of phenomena.
All changes, however apparently random or chaotic, are law governed. Plato's world of Forms gives
intelligible structure to the Logos, just as his world of phenomena — the world we inhabit, so long as
we remain 'imprisoned' in our earthly bodies — represents a world of Heraclitean flux. So in Plato's
philosophy we can find, if not religion, then an eschatology. There is rational hope, for those who
strive to make their souls more philosophical, more detached from physical things, of an eternal life
'amongst the Forms'.

In the Phaedo, one of the greatest and certainly the most moving of all Plato's dialogues, Socrates,
condemned to death for 'impeity' and now facing the very last day of his life, discusses with his
friends various arguments for the immortality of the soul. In the course of the discussion, Plato
introduces the concept of 'hypothesis'. We may be unsure whether to accept theory A or theory B.
One way to proceed is to put forward the 'hypothesis' of A, and see what follows. If the consequences
are unacceptable, for example, if the assumption of A leads to a contradiction, then we can examine
whether the hypothesis of B fares any better. In that way, the philosopher is able to make progress
without assuming a fixed starting point, or 'taking something for granted'. That idea, the idea of
dialecticis one Socrates' and Plato's greatest gifts to the Western philosophical tradition.

In Plato's jaundiced view, the Sophists did not practice dialectic. They did not use the method of
hypothesis in the search for ultimate truth. They practiced eristic,logic chopping. The Sophists taught
how to 'make the weaker argument appear stronger.'

But why should we believe that dialectic, or learning how to demolish hypotheses will ever get you to
the truth? Plato's early dialogues show Socrates again and again proving the point that he knew
nothing, save the fact that he was ignorant. Every definition of the moral virtues put forward by his
helpless interlocutors falls to pieces under his dialectical blade.

Plato got 'religion'. He found his theory of Forms. The Sophists were perhaps wiser to the limits of
philosophical method. Some, it is true seemed to tend towards nihilism: like Gorgias who wrote a
notorious, some say satirical treatise On What is Not— in which he argued that nothing exists, and
even if something did exist no-one could ever know it — or Thrasymachus whose view that 'justice is
the interests of the stronger' provides the starting point for Plato's investigation in the Republic. The
greatest of all the Sophists, Protagoras, who taught that we ourselves are the 'measure' of values,
was not arguing for nihilism. Pirsig, in Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenancemakes a convincing
case that the Sophists were passionately concerned with values.

Like Nietzsche, their modern counterpart, who repeatedly portrays nihilism as the greatest threat to
human culture, the Sophists saw values as ultimately coming from usrather than from a Platonic
Heaven. That is not nihilism. It is a way, the Nietzschean would argue — as Russell argued in 'A Free
Man's Worship' — to embrace the reality of values without accepting the false comforts of religion.

Geoffrey Klempner