The Turn to the Good: A Narrative Review of the Sophists, Socrates, and Plato, from the Sophistic Marketplace to the Cave's Sun
Year: 2026
Type: review
Abstract: The fifth and fourth centuries BC turned Greek thought from nature to the human good: the sophists taught persuasion for the marketplace, Socrates made ethics a cross-examining discipline, and Plato answered both with the theory of Forms and the dialogues' literary philosophy. This article presents a narrative review of the primary literature of that turn. The synthesis is organized around three themes: the sophistic marketplace and the Socratic rupture, in which Kerferd's sophistic movement, Aristophanes's caricature, Xenophon's memoir, and Plato's Apology fixed the contest over what wisdom is; the method and the Forms, in which the Meno's recollection, the Phaedo's arguments, Burnyeat's analysis of midwifery, and Irwin's moral theory reconstructed the elenchus and its metaphysical completion; and the dialogue as philosophy's form, in which Kahn's account of the Socratic dialogue's literary use, Annas's introduction to the Republic, and the Republic's own cave and sun made the written conversation the vehicle of the theory. It is concluded that the Socratic-Platonic literature founded philosophy's permanent double question---how to live and how to know---and founded, with it, the dialogue as the form in which such questions are best pursued.
Authors: Revista, Zen, PHILOSOPHY, 10
Institution: Faculdades Guarulhos
Language: English
Subfield: Philosophy
Field: Arts and Humanities
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: green
OpenAlex ID: W7204792307