The Socio-Political Implications of the Sophists Concept of Law and Morality

The sophists were itinerant teacher who shifted the attention of philosophy from nature to man. As teachers, their doctrine was anchored on the ideals of relativism, subjectivism, contextualism, and to that extent what Machiavelli later came to understand as “the end justifies the means” dictum. Their major theses, “man is the measure of all things…” and “law is the advantage of the strong” attest to this. Given the above, this paper contends that such ideals if wholly applied in law and morality, could lead society to become more or less what Hobbes regarded as the ‘state of nature’ where chaos and may be oppression, would reign supreme. This in no way is to condemn entirely the sophists contributions to philosophy

Pragmatic Critique of Plato’s Theory of Education

Plato in his ideal state, propounded a theory of education which involves rigorous process and which he believed could help determine the class where each individual citizen could be grouped. This theory though very fantastic when examined theoretically, is not without some flaws. It is because of these flaws that some philosophers describe his theory as utopian. In this work, effort will be made to find out the workability of the theory, in other words, we will try to expose the flaws in it and at the same time appraise the workable aspect of the theory by considering the theory pragmatically