In the late fifth century BCE, traditional religious beliefs and practices were being reconsidered from a variety of intellectual fields and viewpoints, but perhaps most vigorously interrogated by the Sophists. Although ancient Greek religion was characteristically open to change and local variety, the Sophists and contemporaneous thinkers put this flexibility to the test, as ancient reports of trials against intellectuals on account of their religious views attest. Anaxagoras and Socrates, in different ways, offer novel perspectives on what the divine is and is not; Protagoras in one way and the Derveni author in another question traditional certainties about our access to and knowledge of the divine; Prodicus, Democritus, and the so-called Sisyphus fragment provide psychological and/or sociological explanations of religious beliefs; and characters in plays by Euripides and Aristophanes deny outright the existence of the gods and, with that, the existence of traditional moral values.

Sophists were active participants in ancient discussions about being or what-is at the most general level. This chapter discusses the contributions of Gorgias, Protagoras, Xeniades, and Lycophron in the context of the Eleatic philosophers Parmenides, Zeno, and Melissus. All of these figures share a serious commitment to ontological inquiry as well as a concern with the problems that arise when discussing being or what-is. They also share an approach to these problems that is at times paradoxical and self-undermining. The chapter begins with a brief discussion of Parmenides’ poem, a work that serves as an important backdrop for later ontology. It then covers Gorgias’ On Not-Being, a response to the Eleatics and a unique contribution in its own right. Gorgias’ work is then compared with that of Zeno and Melissus. Finally, the more limited evidence we have of Protagoras, Xeniades, and Lycophron’s ontological theorizing is discussed.

This chapter locates the Sophists within the context of earlier Greek wisdom traditions and efforts by a variety of individuals (from Hesiod to Parmenides and Pindar) to establish and communicate their own poetic and/or intellectual authority. The Sophists participated in long-standing debates over the relationship between sophia and technê, and over tensions surrounding physical versus intellectual skills, learning, and teaching. They also looked back to the practice of wisdom and maxim collection. There was no dominant tradition under which one could unify the manifestations of sophia in Archaic and early Classical Greece; this complexity was an important aspect of the sophistic inheritance, and is the background against which we must measure individual efforts to claim distinctive achievement. The analysis traces the importance of Hesiodic and quasi-Hesiodic wisdom collections, the emergence of the inquiry into nature and of intellectual and cultural experts known as “sages” (sophoi), and the representation of sophia in sympotic and epinician poetry.

“The Sophists” generally refers to Protagoras, Gorgias, Hippias, Prodicus, and Antiphon, as well as to a few lesser-known fifth-century figures; but why it does so, and what holds these men together, has been a matter of debate from Plato’s time to our own. Neither of the two standard explanations fit all and only these figures – the philosophical one, that they share some revolutionary epistemological outlook (for instance, relativism or anti-realism), or the sociological one, that they are primarily teachers of virtue of pay. This Introduction proposes revisiting the Sophists as celebrated instances of their time, a period of energetic intellectual discovery, experimentation, and communication. Doing so opens new questions about their continuity with their background culture as well as any distinctive interests, methods, or beliefs they might have. The Introduction goes on to discuss all early uses of the term sophistês in the fifth century (from Pindar through Thucydides) and its dominant uses in the fourth century, allowing us to see the range of kinds of people it applied to and the force with which it was applied. Then it describes the heterogeneous evidence base for Sophists and cognate figures. It concludes with a summary of the volume’s chapters.

The chapter presents the Sophists’ more original contributions to political thought and shows how some of their ideas, which were often developed in the course of their practice as advisors or pedagogues, influenced the work of the two major philosophers of the next generation, Plato and Aristotle. The chapter’s first section shows the debt of early theorizing on constitutions to the Sophists’ practice of antilogia or debate but also to the discussions about democracy that mark Athenian intellectual life in the last decades of the fifth century, and shows how such theorizing provides the springboard for Plato’s pursuit for the best constitution. Its second section focuses on the criticism of law and argues that (despite what continues to be a dominant interpretation in the study of Sophistic thinking) such criticism should not be understood as a threat to morality but rather as constructive reflection on the nature and the limits of legislation.

Fourth-century philosophy-aligned authors often present negative views of “sophistry” but more charitable views of those fifth-century individuals they call “Sophist” or include among “the Sophists.” This chapter attends to this often unacknowledged difference, giving evidence for it and offering several explanations. It reviews what fourth-century authors – Isocrates, Alcidamas, Xenophon, Plato, and Aristotle – said about the canonical fifth-century Sophists, Gorgias in particular but also Protagoras, Hippias, Prodicus, and Antiphon. It then assesses what they said about “sophistry,” which they usually presented atemporally, not specifically a phenomenon of a previous generation. Along the way, the chapter discusses how this later generation posited what is now seen as a “Sophistic movement,” the rise of a coherent group of paid teachers of rhetoric and civically valuable skills. Plato, long held responsible for this position, does play an important role, but for reasons connected to his dramatic presentation of Socrates.

This chapter, which serves as the introduction, outlines the objectives and key questions of the volume, reviews existing scholarship on ancient women philosophers, and highlights the original philosophical contributions of each chapter. A substantial section is devoted to the specific challenges in the study of ancient women philosophers, with special focus on source issues, as well as the methods the contributors of the volume have adopted to face these challenges and approach these female thinkers philosophically. We argue that the study of ancient women philosophers has a special value for our understanding of the history of philosophy. While at first daunting, this unique set of thinkers and the available evidence both enrich our insight into the methodology of the history of philosophy and re-introduce philosophical contributions which would otherwise be lost.

Ban Zhao (c. 45–117) was the first woman public intellectual in ancient China. Her Lessons for Women (Nüjie), composed around 100 CE, was the earliest Chinese written work known to be authored by a woman scholar solely intended for women’s education. This text was widely studied since its publication until the early twentieth century. Besides being an accoladed scholar, Ban Zhao was also a mother of several children. Her life and writings exhibited an interesting contradiction between her independent spirit as a contrarian and a conformist compromise to constrictive social norms on women. Consequently, she was both praised as an exemplary woman philosopher and condemned as an accomplice of the patriarchal oppression of women. This chapter argues against the overly-simplistic anti-feminist charge of Ban Zhao by examining her life and a wider range of her writings than is usually considered, including not only her Lessons for Women but also her poetry and official memoranda, in order to reappraise her philosophy and her distinctive strategy to gender politics.

This chapter argues that women doctors participated in a philosophical tradition of thought in classical antiquity. The widely recognised overlap between medicine and philosophy in ancient Greece means that women with medical expertise were very likely involved in the philosophical aspects of the domain. While no extant writings from women doctors survive, the chapter provides evidence of ancient Greek women’s claims to knowledge as found in the writings of male philosophers and doctors. A picture is reconstructed of expertise not only about the female body and its functions and cycles but also a broader understanding of health, disease, fertility, and their relationship to the natural world. The areas of women’s knowledge covered are: experience of the body, theories of the body, pharmacology and theories of reproduction. It is explained how these count as philosophical and why we must consider these women’s ideas to be a significant part of our intellectual heritage.

Arete of Cyrene was daughter and disciple of the founder of the Cyrenaic school and mother and teacher of the figure who codified its principles. Our sources emphasize her as a link in the intellectual chain connecting the school it its Socratic roots, to the detriment of preserving her own philosophical ideas. In this chapter, I make a case for her philosophical contribution to the Cyrenaics, as revealed in a careful reading of the few sources we have. I follow this with methodological reflections on how we might access a figure like Arete. I argue that this task requires and licenses the adoption of severed methodological strategies related to an added open-mindedness to source material. I reflect on how these methodological points contribute to a wider project of recovering the thought of marginalized figures.

Sosipatra of Ephesus and Hypatia of Alexandria are the most prominent female philosophers and teachers of the Neoplatonic schools of late antiquity. However, none of their philosophical writings were passed down to us, so that – in recovering their thoughts – we depend on letters written to them and texts written about them. In these sources, Sosipatra and Hypatia appear to us as some kind of schisms, that is as historical figures on the one hand and as literary characters on the other hand, used by other authors to express their views on the philosophical life and the ideal way of living as a woman. This chapter will do justice to both aspects, unpacking what the sources allow us to conclude about the philosophical teaching of the historical Sospiatra and Hypatia and discussing how both characters are used by other Neoplatonists to convey certain ideals of femaleness.

This chapter investigates ancient accounts of women Epicureans and considers how critics of Epicureanism attempted to undermine hedonism by sexualizing their accounts of the school’s women. The misogyny directed at women Epicureans was noteworthy insofar as its primary goal seems not to have been to undermine the women themselves but rather to undermine the school’s main ethical tenets; in other words, anti-hedonists used misogyny as a tool for philosophical criticism. The chapter aims to show that, despite the scarcity of extant philosophical works by Epicurean women, there is still much to be gained from studying the extant accounts of their activities and relationships: we stand to deepen our understanding of the place of women in the school, particularly our knowledge of how they were viewed by other members, as well as our understanding of the polemical tactics employed by ancient critics of Epicurean hedonism.