The Sophists were the first ancient thinkers who considered the issue of man as the main subject of philosophy. They were the first to change the direction of philosophical research from phusis to nomos. Almost at the same time and a short while after the rise of the Sophists, in spite of their disagreements with and fundamental oppositions to these thinkers, Socrates, Plato, and also Aristotle introduced man as the primary concern of philosophical theories. This was the main commonality between the views of the Sophists and ancient philosophers. On the other hand, there is also a kind of formal proximity between Socrates and the Sophists in terms of their method of dialectics and discourse. However, since Socrates considers a fixed criterion for knowledge which is free from sense impressions, he criticizes Protagoras’ statement as to “Man is the measure of all things”, and argues that Protagoras focuses on individual man and considers the truth to be relative. In this way, a comparative study of the ideas of the Sophists and philosophers reveals that both groups followed the same subject and method but had different purposes. The Sophists’ purpose was teaching, while philosophers sought their end in knowing the truth. This paper aims to discover the differences and similarities between these two approaches. In doing so, it initially deliberates accurately over their distinctive ideas and then clearly explains that some of the philosophical findings of the Sophists, in spite of their historical notoriety, have exercised some lasting effects on contemporary philosophy. In other words, by changing the direction of philosophy’s attention to the problem of man, in a sense, they developed the basis for modern philosophy.
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