Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of Abbreviations
- Preface
- I INTRODUCTION
- II TOPICS OF THE DAY
- III WHAT IS A SOPHIST?
- IV THE ‘NOMOS’ – ‘PHYSIS’ ANTITHESIS IN MORALS AND POLITICS
- V THE SOCIAL COMPACT
- VI EQUALITY
- VII THE RELATIVITY OF VALUES AND ITS EFFECTS ON ETHICAL THEORY
- VIII RHETORIC AND PHILOSOPHY (Seeming and being, believing and knowing, persuading and proving)
- IX RATIONALIST THEORIES OF RELIGION: AGNOSTICISM AND ATHEISM
- X CAN VIRTUE BE TAUGHT?
- XI THE MEN
- Bibliography
- Index of passages quoted or referred to
- General Index
- Index of selected Greek words
VII - THE RELATIVITY OF VALUES AND ITS EFFECTS ON ETHICAL THEORY
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 August 2015
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of Abbreviations
- Preface
- I INTRODUCTION
- II TOPICS OF THE DAY
- III WHAT IS A SOPHIST?
- IV THE ‘NOMOS’ – ‘PHYSIS’ ANTITHESIS IN MORALS AND POLITICS
- V THE SOCIAL COMPACT
- VI EQUALITY
- VII THE RELATIVITY OF VALUES AND ITS EFFECTS ON ETHICAL THEORY
- VIII RHETORIC AND PHILOSOPHY (Seeming and being, believing and knowing, persuading and proving)
- IX RATIONALIST THEORIES OF RELIGION: AGNOSTICISM AND ATHEISM
- X CAN VIRTUE BE TAUGHT?
- XI THE MEN
- Bibliography
- Index of passages quoted or referred to
- General Index
- Index of selected Greek words
Summary
If physical philosophy begins in wonder, ethics may be said to have begun in Scepticism.
Grant, Ethics, I, 155.The chapter on the Sophists (p. 49) mentioned Sir Alexander Grant's division of morality into three stages, corresponding in a nation to childhood, adolescence and maturity in the individual. In one respect his division would not pass unchallenged today. He calls the second, sceptical or sophistic era ‘transitional’, and implies that only the third, that is, a return to earlier beliefs more deeply held because attained by independent thought, represents maturity. In Greek thought the transition was to the idealism of Plato, a philosophical reaffirmation and defence of those absolute values which are accepted by the ‘simplicity and trust’ of childhood as they are in the pre-critical stage of society. The second or sceptical stage might equally well be called positivist, and it is by no means generally accepted that belief in absolute values is more mature than positivism. Not every adult recovers the convictions of his childhood. The positivist rejects the view that positive law must set out from the ideal of a natural, i.e. universally valid, standard of right: there is only a relative right or goodness, which is derived from the positive law prevailing at a particular time. The positivist knows that the search for goodness is a chimaera-hunt. Similarly beauty, as it was for Hume, is ‘no quality in things themselves, it exists merely in the minds which contemplate them, and each mind perceives a different beauty’. In statements like these the modern positivist would not wish to be told that his standpoint was either pre-Platonic or adolescent, but he is in fact repeating the Sophists' assertions in the controversy of the fifth and fourth centuries B.C. Value for him, as for Archelaus, exists by nomos only, not by physis.
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- Information
- A History of Greek Philosophy , pp. 164 - 175Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 1977