Protagoras asserts that on every issue there are two opposed logoi or rational accounts, the weaker of which may be made stronger (DK80.B6a; B6b); and Edward Schiappa's account of the Sophists illustrates the tenacity of these assertions.1 For in his book on Protagoras, his essays on Gorgias, and his discussions of Greek rhetoric, Schiappa advocates a reading of the Sophists that opposes what he sees as the currently "stronger" account offered by a contemporary school of "neo-sophist" scholars and theorists. In this essay, I will examine Schiappa's reading of the Sophists and explain why I think he fails to make his own account appear the stronger. To this end, I first delineate the epistemological assumptions, hermeneutic strategies and resulting interpretations advanced by Schiappa's neosophistic rivals, whom I identify as "anti-foundationalist." I next examine Schiappa's critique of his adversaries and the nature of his own "foundationalist" reading, one he presents as a more accurate and objective historical account of the Sophists. Aligning myself with his neosophistic opponents, I then criticize Schiappa's project, arguing that rather than offering a more objective and accurate account, Schiappa instead presents a highly partisan interpretation based on his own positivist assumptions and strategies of reading.

Neosophists and anti-foundationalism

In order to understand Schiappa's reading of the Sophists, it is useful first to delineate the account he seeks to overturn; for Schiappa sees contemporary study of the Greek Sophists as divided into two warring camps that differ in their assumptions, methods, and resulting interpretations. Using a fashionable topos, we may characterize the neosophistic camp, one including John Poulakos, Richard Lanham, Stanley Fish, Victor Vitanza, and Susan Jarratt, as "anti-foundationalist; and we may identify Schiappa's camp, one including Eric Havelock, G. B. Kerferd, Jacqueline de Romilly, and Thomas Cole, as "foundationalist." This distinction is illuminating, for it situates the battle between these two schools within the war raging in contemporary academia between what Vitanza calls the "Third Sophistic" and the persistent "onto-theological tradition, which is 'foundationalism'" (119). Insofar as neosophists ascribe to anti-foundationalism, they tend to maintain with Fish that assertions of "fact, truth, correctness, validity, and clarity" are not made "in reference to some extracontextual, ahistorical, noninstitutional reality, or rule, or law, or value," but are instead "intelligible and debatable only within the precincts of the context or situations or paradigms or communities that give them their local and changeable shape" (342-3). Schiappa's camp, in contrast, undertakes what Fish describes as the foundationalist attempt to "ground inquiry and communication in something more firm and stable than mere belief or unexamined practice," a ground that renders our beliefs "objective and principled," remaining "invariant across contexts and even cultures" and independent of "political, partisan and 'subjective' concerns in relation to which it must act as a constraint," and serving as a "reference point or checkpoint against which claims to knowledge and success can be measured and adjudicated" (342). As a consequence of their anti-foundationalist assumptions, neosophists posit an inescapable "hermeneutic circle" between themselves and the extant fragments of the Greek Sophists. Rather than attempting to grasp an "essential meaning" in these fragments, they insist that their observations are conditioned by the contingent and partisan assumptions and interpretive strategies sanctioned by the scholarly community itself. As such, they contend that every extant fragment acquires meaning only within the terminological and conceptual context of a scholarly community; and that the meaning of each "part" of a text acquires meaning only in respect to the "whole" that the readers construct. In Poulakos' terms, texts are not "stable objects of investigation. . . that can be explored disinterestedly"; and it is illusory to think one can escape one's own contingent historical situation by projecting oneself into the "mindset of past authors so as to recreate how they and their contemporaries understood a given text" (1995, 2; 1990, 220). Further, neosophists tend to hold that since there is no objective or essential kernel of "meaning" to be discovered, and hence that no one interpretation or account is able to claim privileged access to that meaning, it is always possible to generate a competing interpretation, one that cannot be "refuted" by reference to any objective "facts" about the texts. This does not relegate neosophists to a state of solipsism or vulgar relativism, however, wherein all readings are "subjective" and equally viable. For they contend that readings are sanctioned by what Fish calls "interpretive communities" whose assumptions, procedures, and specifications regulate and permit a limited range of permissible accounts (153). In this context, an interpretation of a text is deemed preferable to rival interpretations not because it corresponds to the real intentions of the text's putative author, but because it is more persuasive to other recognized members of the interpretive community itself.

Given that they see every interpretation as anchored in the assumptions, terminologies and practices of contemporary communities, neosophists tend to see every historical account as what Nietzsche calls a "genealogy," an overtly partisan and partial narrative fabricated by scholars from their own contingent vantage point. And in their own genealogy of Greek history, neosophists tend to depict the Greek Sophists as what Nietzsche calls his own "precursors and co-workers" (1967, 464) in an ongoing quarrel with foundationalist adversaries. For they see the Sophists as early critics of Parmenides, Plato and Aristotle, foundationalist thinkers who initiated what Joseph Margolis calls the "classical (the Parmenidean) canon: the canon that holds that reality possesses invariant structures and that human science is capable of-- indeed, is formed specifically for-- discerning just those structures" (20-21). Tom Kent thus asserts that the Sophists comprise an important part of the "genealogy" of his neosophistic "paralogic" rhetoric (46); Vitanza associates himself specifically with Gorgias, whom he depicts as the principal "counter-foundational" precursor of the twentieth-century "Third Sophistic" (120, 125); and Fish asserts that the Sophists not only anticipate anti-foundationalism, but that "another word for anti-foundationalism is rhetoric, and one could say without too much exaggeration that modern anti-foundationalism is old sophism writ analytic" (347, italics added).

As Fish's comment reveals, one of the topoi neosophists frequently use to distinguish the Greek Sophists from their fifth and fourth-century rivals is that of "philosophy" and "rhetoric." Neosophists see this topos as crucial, in that they often identify "rhetoric" with the antifoundationalist world view itself, and "philosophy" with the search for ontological or epistemological foundations. In this vein, they read the Sophists as advocating a "rhetoricist" model that depicts every assertion as contestive and fabricative, and as repudiating the foundationalists' "representational" model, one that depicts language as able to picture or mirror facts about an independent "reality." Richard Rorty thus construes the Sophists as opposed to Plato's "philosophical thinking," in that they see certainty to be "a matter of conversation between persons rather than a matter of interaction with nonhuman reality," as depending on an "airtight case" rather than an "unshakable foundation." (1979, 157). Lanham, similarly, classifies thinkers from the Greeks to the present as either "rhetorical" and playful or "serious" and philosophical (1-4); Roochnik depicts the Sophists as early proponents of the "rhetorical" position in what Plato calls the "old quarrel" between philosophy and rhetoric (1991, 226); and Poulakos characterizes the "Sophistic conception of rhetoric" as "an art which seeks to capture in opportune moments that which is appropriate and attempts to suggest that which is possible" (1983, 36), an art which, with little variation, may be used to describe the anti-foundationalist, hermeneutical conception of inquiry itself. In the neosophists' construal, Sophistic rhetors reject the foundationalist philosophers' claim that a universally valid method of "rational inquiry" will afford access to a context-invariant Truth; for rhetors see "rationality" as using whatever vocabulary is at hand in order to make sense of an ambiguous situation, and they see "truth" is a sobriquet that a particular audience accords to the account they consider most persuasive.

Whereas they tend to identify all of the Greek Sophists as their precursors, neosophists have championed Protagoras and Gorgias as articulating the most forceful accounts of anti-foundationalism. Roochnik construes Protagoras' remark professing ignorance about the gods (DK80.B4) and his assertion that "man is the measure of all things" (DK80.B1) as articulating complementary tenets of anti-foundationalism, namely that there is no "god's eye view" free of all perspectives and partisan biases from which we are able to apprehend the True nature of things; and that "there are no absolute, no natural, structures or standards that exist independently of the human beings who hold them" (1990, 45). Nietzsche suggests that Protagoras' claims that there are "two contrary logoi or interpretations are present about every thing, opposed to each other" (DK80.B6a), and that it is possible to make a "weaker" interpretation appear the stronger" (DK80.B6b), indicate that every art other than debate is "superfluous," since every claim is inescapably perspectival and contestive, warrantable as "true" only insofar as it defeats rival claims made before particular audiences (1989, 215). And Otto Rankin construes Protagoras' remark that it is "impossible to contradict" any account or logos (DK80.A1) as indicating that we cannot disprove any interpretation by reference to any independent criteria that serve as the foundation of those accounts (25-6). Similarly, neosophists tend to read Gorgias as advancing a complementary variant of anti-foundationalism. Eric White construes Gorgias's key notion of kairos, the "timely" or "opportune," as affirming the situatedness of knowledge and discourse (13-20); Alexander Mourelatos reads Gorgias's argument in On the Non-Existent that "nothing exists; second, that even if it exists it is inapprehensible to man; third, that even if it is apprehensible, still it is without a doubt incapable of being expressed or explained to the next man" (DK82.B3) as a repudiation of Parmenidean foundationalism and its corresponding representational model of language (151-54); and Roochnik reads Gorgias's claim in Helen that truth is an "ornament" of language (Helen 1), and that nobody has "objective" or universal "memory of the past and knowledge of the present and foreknowledge of the future" (Helen 11), as affirming the Sophist's anti-foundationalist model of language (48-50). Nicole Loraux construes the Epitaphios as a demonstration of how "truth" is fabricated with conventional and artificial topoi (Loraux 225-230); and A. A. Long sees the Defense of Palamedes as demonstrating the way in which a rhetor fabricates truths from "conventions and stereotypes" while remaining "completely neutral in its claims about the nature of things" (Long 238-9). In respect to Gorgias's antithetical and florid epideictic style, Jarratt suggests that Gorgias parodies prevailing modes of discourse in order to alert his audience to "the power of language and ways it can be used on the unsuspecting" (57); and we may also read Gorgias's playful antitheses and tropes as self-parodic or ironic, whereby he underscores the situatedness of his own assertions and presents himself as what Rorty calls an "ironist," a person who "faces up to the contingency of his or her own most central beliefs and desires" and who abandons "the idea that those central beliefs and desires refer back to something beyond the reach of time and chance" (1990, xv).

Schiappa's foundationalist project

Whereas the neosophists portray the Greek Sophists as their anti-foundationalist precursors, Schiappa contends that this construal is a solipsistic and anachronistic retrojection of their own theories, a "construction of neosophistic rhetorical theory and criticism" rather than a disinterested and unbiased account that relies on "historical fact" (PL 65, italics added). Drawing on Rorty's distinction between "historical" and "rational" reconstructions of past thinkers, Schiappa characterizes his objective as one of articulating an historical reconstruction of the Sophists' ideas "in their own words and intellectual context," rather than formulating their ideas in twentieth-century, anachronistic terminology (1984, 50). In stark contrast to his neosophist rivals, Schiappa asserts that the objective of sophistic studies "should not be to redeem or condemn the Sophists," but to attain "a thorough and comprehensive recovery of each Sophist's thinking as far as the available evidence permits," and to "understand sophistic thinking in its own context as far as possible" (PL 81). He acknowledges that every reconstruction is limited, and that "there is no such thing as a final, objective, impersonal historical account"; but he insists that "it does not follow that all [readings] are equally valuable or 'valid,'" for some are clearly more accurate than others in their fidelity to objective data or facts, while others "stretch the original context and anachronistically inject later developed abstractions" (1990b 308-310). Schiappa thus echoes Romilly's criticism of neosophist scholars who read the Sophists "in such a way so as to detect in them their own particular problems and prejudices," and who thereby turn their back upon "history as it was lived, within the framework of fifth-century Athens"(xi). And he applauds Allan Bloom's assertion that "if we were to study history according to our tastes, we would see nothing but ourselves everywhere; and that "[T]hought is the prisoner of whatever place it is to be found [if] it cannot break the bonds of the present" (PL 67-68, italics added). In order to "break the bonds of the present" and arrive at a more objective and accurate "historical reconstruction" of the Sophists, Schiappa advocates two complementary hermeneutic strategies. First, he argues that we must "bracket" modern philosophical terms and concepts as much as possible, so as to avoid "improper and premature schematization" (PL 21). Unlike neosophists who insist that we are never able to escape our own terms and concepts, Schiappa maintains that attributing our anachronistic concepts to the Greek Sophists obstructs our understanding of their own concerns, and confines us to our own limited perspective. Schiappa thus recommends privileging "data" rather than our own "theories," or the "parts" rather than the "whole," by attending to the meaning of the actual words or ipsissima verba of the Sophists before attributing anachronistic theories to them. A fortiori, he argues that we should interpret each Sophist individually before concluding that he may have shared any ideas or interests with his fifth-century "colleagues." Complementing this bracketing of anachronistic terms and assumptions, Schiappa argues that we must ground our interpretation of what the Sophists' themselves meant in their own context, namely that of fifth-century Greece. Rather than wrenching their fragments from their original context and relocating them in our own conceptual frameworks, we should situate the Sophists' fragments vis a vis the texts of authors in the same period. In order to make sense of individual terms the Sophists use, Schiappa advocates "triangulating" each term in respect to its use by previous and subsequent Greek authors (PL 34-5). He thus contends, for example, that "it is reasonable to hypothesize that Protagoras' usage shows some advancement over his predecessors while not reaching the sort of sophistication found in Plato and Aristotle" (PL 34). Schiappa's interpretation of the Sophists' individual fragments, and consequently of their "doctrines," depends ultimately on his account of the "fifth-century historical framework" in which the Sophists lived. Drawing on a traditional distinction between mythos and logos, he characterizes the fifth century in Greece as undergoing an evolution or progression from a more primitive culture based largely on myth, to a more developed culture relying on logos or rational inquiry (PL 21ff). Schiappa identifies the "mythic-poetic tradition" of early Greece as "a constellation of certain social practices, including specific forms of discourse (primarily oral poetry), patterns of explanation (typically theistic), and political orientations (elitist)"; and he describes the emerging "rationalistic" culture, one whose fourth-century representatives include Plato and Aristotle, as a culture in which "oral and written prose challenged poetry, anthropocentric or 'scientific' explanations challenged theistic traditions, and radical democracy challenged more elitist forms of government" (PL 30). Drawing on the writings of Eric Havelock and Walter Ong, Schiappa further associates the mythic-poetic culture with "oral" culture, and the rationalistic culture with the "literate," contending that "an oral culture's thought and expression are additive rather than subordinate, aggregate rather than analytic, close to the human life world, empathetic and participatory rather than objectively distanced, and situational rather than abstract" (PL 28). And drawing on the writings of Julius Moravcsik, Schiappa contends that Greek thought in the fifth century progressed from "stage 2 explanation, in terms of composition or constituency, and stage 3 explanation in terms of entities and their qualities" (PL 194).

By bracketing modern concepts and grounding his account in this historical context, Schiappa generates an account of the Sophists that is strikingly different from that advanced by his neosophistic rivals. Whereas neosophists tend to depict their Greek precursors as hostile to the foundational thesis that a universal faculty of reason affords access to context-invariant truths, Schiappa portrays the Greek Sophists as vigorous proponents of such a rational faculty of logos. For rather than seeing the Sophists as arch rivals of Plato and Aristotle, Schiappa presents the Sophists as transitional figures of the fifth-century Enlightenment, initiating inquiries into logic and language and helping to transform Greece from an oral, mythical-poetic culture into a literate and rational culture. As such, he follows Havelock in seeing the Sophists as "Plato's allies in his educational campaign against the poets" (PL 16; Havelock 8). Schiappa thus argues that Protagoras "was a pivotal figure in the transition between two states of metaphysical explanation" whose theorizing provided Plato and Aristotle with the "conceptual tools" essential to their own philosophies (PL 194). In particular, he reads Protagoras' claim that "humanity is the measure of all things" as an indication that the Sophist "was a transitional figure between compositional and attributional logics of explanation" (PL 127); and he reads Protagoras' remark professing his ignorance of the gods as indicating a "preference for common sense over purely theoretical speculation" (PL 148). Unlike those neosophists who read Protagoras' remark that it is "impossible to contradict" as denying that rational accounts may be refuted by uninterpreted "facts," Schiappa sees the remark as anticipating Aristotle's foundationalist "law of noncontradiction" (PL 138). Schiappa construes Protagoras' assertion that there are "two opposed logoi" on every issue as marking "a transition between compositional and attributional patterns/logics of explanation" (PL 100); and he reads Protagoras' assertion that it is possible to make a weaker logos stronger as paralleling "Plato's treatment of physical change as the alternation of stronger elements with weaker ones and Aristotle's description of potential qualities becoming actual" (PL 194). Schiappa also characterizes Gorgias as a transitional figure in the progression from the irrational mythical tradition to the rationalism of the Socratic schools, remarking that whereas "Protagoras seems to have been the first Sophist to privilege logos over the mythic-poetic tradition, virtually all the Sophists can be so characterized" (PL 57). In particular, he remarks that Gorgias "held certain "scientific" theories," and that "his teaching and practice represented a humanistic-rationalist turn from the tradition of mythos (PL 57). Concerning Gorgias's treatise On the Non-Existent, Schiappa argues that the work "places him squarely in the rationalistic tradition (in response to Parmenides) and contrasts him with the mythic-poetic tradition" (PL 57); and he contends that since Gorgias uses "careful argumentation" in the work it ought to be read as "legitimate philosophy" rather than as a "mere rhetorical display" (1994, 156). Concerning his notorious style, Schiappa contends that Gorgias's "sophistic stylistic innovation was closely related to the changing syntax, word meanings, and modes of expression that mark the transition between the mythic-poetic and the rationalistic, literate ways of life" (72). Specifically, Schiappa reads Gorgias as a "prose rhapsode" who uses poetic devices in order to convey meaning clearly and effectively in oral settings. Rather than seeing Gorgias as parodically subverting dominant modes of discourse or ironically alerting the audience to the contingency and artificiality of his own claims, Schiappa depicts Gorgias as a proto-Aristotelian rhetor who uses figurative language to convey "information" more effectively. He thus contends that "Gorgias skillfully uses rhetorical questions to guide the hearer through his reasoning" (1991, 243); that he uses numerous parallel constructions "as an appropriate aid to memory"; and that he uses metaphor, antithesis, parison, and isocola to "enhance" his arguments (1991, 252-254).

Armed with his hermeneutic strategies of bracketing modern concepts and situating the Sophists in their own transitional historical framework, Schiappa advances what is perhaps his most provocative thesis, namely that the neosophists' attribution of a theory of "rhetoric" to the Sophists is unwarranted. Schiappa's argument against using the term "rhetorical" to describe the Sophists is central to his attack on the neosophistic reading, for it challenges their contention that the Sophists professed a "rhetoricist" (or anti-foundational) model of language opposed to the "representationalist" model of language advanced by their foundationalist adversaries. Schiappa does not deny that the Sophists engaged in rational studies of language and logic; and as such he seems to agree with Thomas Cole's thesis that with the development of rational inquiry and the introduction of literacy, theorists analyzed and formulated the practice of eloquence in a rational art of rhetoric; and that the art of rhetoric "is to poetry and eloquence what science is to magic, or philosophy to mythology" (1). But Schiappa attacks the neosophistic notion that the Sophists articulated a theory of rhetoric as anachronistic, given that the term rhetorike was not used by any of the fifth-century Sophists and indeed was not even invented until Plato coined the term in the 380's (PL 39-63). Schiappa is especially critical of Poulakos' characterization of "Sophistic" rhetoric as "an art which seeks to capture in opportune moments that which is appropriate and attempts to suggest that which is possible" (1983, 36), arguing that Poulakos' reliance on such notions as "art," the "opportune" and the "possible" is anachronistic and inaccurate.

A stronger logos?

How successful is Schiappa in making his account "stronger" than that of his neo-sophistic rivals? As an admitted anti-foundationalist, I cannot consistently argue that Schiappa's account is "inaccurate," for with Protagoras I think that it is "impossible to contradict" any rational account by an appeal to independent "facts." But as Fish points out, one may challenge a foundationalist by exposing those entities he posits as foundational and context-invariant to be situated, rhetorical fabrications. This "deconstructive" procedure involves unmasking "the mediated, constructed, partial, socially constituted nature of all realities, whether they be phenomenal, linguistic, or psychological" (492); and demonstrating that the foundationalist text that affirms them rests on "the suppression of the challengeable rhetoricity of its own standpoint, a standpoint that offers itself as if it came from nowhere in particular and simply delivered things as they really (i.e. nonperspectivally) are," and to deprive the text of its "claim to be unrhetorical, serious, disinterested" (493). Using this procedure, I suggest, it is possible to show not that Schiappa's account fails to "correspond with what the Sophists really meant"; but rather to show that Schiappa's own reading is highly partisan in respect to the facts and concepts he relies on, and that his resulting account of the Sophists is no more "objective" than that of his neosophistic rivals. Schiappa's first foundationalist claim is that he bases his reading on uninterpreted "facts," specifically the Sophists' own words or ipsissima verba. But this claim is suspect, for as numerous classicists have counselled, the so-called ipsissima verba attributed to the Sophists tend to be paraphrases by subsequent commentators, whose accounts are governed by what each commentator "thought the text ought to say" (Osborne 7). Since the Sophists' original works are lost, every account of a particular fragment's authenticity is inescapably partisan and partial, and dependent upon a scholar's interpretive assumptions and practices. Concerning Protagoras in particular, Robert Gaines points out that the ipsissima verba "are so few and uncertain that their primacy is open to question" (624); and Thomas Conley observes that "attempts to determine which fragments, or which versions of fragments, are 'authentic' are from the outset pretty risky; and 'close readings' that go into detailed discussions of the semantics of key terms in those 'quotations' are even more risky" (419). Concerning Gorgias, modern scholars have disputed vigorously about which texts ought to be considered authentic. Most scholars today accept the fragments assembled by Deils and Kranz as "authentic," but it is important to note that scholars have disputed the authenticity of several of these texts, notably Helen and Palamedes; and that scholars continue to contest the validity of the paraphrases of On the Non-Existent given by pseudo-Aristotle and Sextus.2 The fact that most scholars today tend to agree about which texts ought to be attributed to the figure we call Gorgias does not mean that we have finally arrived at an "accurate" collection of his works; rather, it suggests that we determine the authenticity and accuracy of texts only within the context of our own historically contingent assumptions about Gorgias's style, development, methods of argument, consistency, and "seriousness," and not by penetrating all previous interpretations to arrive at Gorgias's essential words and meanings themselves, as if we were erasing layers of writing on a palimpsest.

Second, whereas he insists that scholars bracket their own anachronistic terms and concepts in order to articulate an "historical" rather than "rational" reconstruction of the Sophists' ideas, Schiappa fails to show that this practice is either possible or desirable. As Rorty himself remarks about the distinction, an historical reconstruction that presents a past thinker's thought "in his own words" is of little if any use apart from a rational reconstruction or "translation" of those words into our own vocabulary. For even if we do not translate and interpret the Sophists' terms we will be reduced to the condition of being "able to exchange courtesies in a foreign tongue without being able to translate what one is saying into our native language." As Rorty notes, "translation is necessary if 'understanding' is to mean something more than engaging in rituals of which we do not see the point, and translating an utterance means fitting it into our practices" (1984, 52n1). Consequently, it is never the case that "one can do historical reconstruction first and leave rational reconstruction for later. . . . These two topics should be seen as moments in a continuing movement around a hermeneutic circle, a circle one has to have gone round a good many times before one can begin to do either sort of reconstruction" (1984, 53n1). In order to understand any term used by Protagoras or Gorgias, we must do more than "triangulate" it in respect to other fourth and fifth century Greek thinkers; rather, we must always include ourselves in the hermeneutic circle, and recognize that we can understand any Greek thinker only within the context of our own terminology. Schiappa himself illustrates this point, for in his readings of the Sophists he repeatedly violates his principle of "bracketing" contemporary terms by relying on such anachronistic terms as "compositional" and "constituent" explanations (PL 194), or "fifth-century" and "fourth-century" thought. Even when he purports to use the Sophists' own terminology, Schiappa relies on his own partisan conceptual scheme to give those terms meaning.

This is perhaps most clearly illustrated in his pivotal topos of "mythos" and "logos," which he interprets in a manner that portrays Greek history as a progression from irrationality to rationality, from "a mythic-poetic to a more literate, humanistic-rationalistic culture" (PL 21). A detailed account of the nature of Greek myth lies beyond the scope of this essay, but we may expose the highly partisan nature of Schiappa's account by contrasting it with an alternative construal of "mythical" and "logical" thinking that overcomes his positivist tendency to identify so-called "mythical" thinking with irrationality. Following G. S. Kirk, we may construe the Greek myths as a diverse family of "traditional narratives" that provide individuals with a repository of binary oppositions, figurative analogies and hundreds of exempla or "instructive cases" for making sense of their experience (290). Using a term suggested by Levi-Strauss, we may describe individuals in the so-called "mythical" period of Greek history as similar to twentieth-century "bricoleurs," practical and adaptive thinkers who use the vocabulary of their myths as a "heterogeneous repertoire" of verbal tools that enable them to adapt to and make sense of novel and fluid situations (17). Rather than distinguishing between irrational "mythical" thought and "rational" scientific thought, and assuming that everybody in a "mythical" period would think in the same irrational manner, we may recognize that some "bricoleurs" in the so-called "mythical" era, such as the clever Palamedes, may be more similar to their sophistic heirs of the fifth (or twentieth) century than to their own "foundationalist" contemporaries. For both the practical bricoleur and the Sophist employ binary oppositions or commonplaces, shared examples or paradigms, and analogical and antithetical figures such as metaphor in order to make sense of ambiguous, novel situations, without resorting to such context-invariant foundations as Zeus's edicts, Parmenides' Being, Plato's Ideas, or Schiappa's "facts."

When we expose his epistemological assumptions and hermeneutic strategies, we may recognize that Schiappa's interpretation of the Sophists is no more "objective" than the admittedly partisan account articulated by his neosophistic rivals. For in his account Schiappa relies on a selection of Sophistic fragments selected and authenticated through the contingent hermeneutic practices of "interested" scholars; he interprets the Sophists' fragments from within his own conceptual framework; and he situates the Sophists in a questionable narrative depicting Greek history as a progression from irrationality to rationality. Indeed, rather than articulating a disinterested "historical reconstruction" of the Sophists based on independent facts, Schiappa advances a highly biased genealogy depicting the Sophists as his own precursors and co-workers in an ongoing foundationalist tradition. Schiappa does not differ from his neosophistic rivals in respect to his objectivity or avoidance of contemporary concepts; rather, he differs only in that he refuses to acknowledge the contingency and partisanship of his own assumptions, strategies and interpretations. This is not to say that the neosophists' account of the Sophists is more "accurate" in the sense of mirroring or corresponding to an independent "historical reality," given that any such putative "reality" is itself a fabrication of interested scholars. Nor is it to say that the neosophists offer the "final word" on the Sophists, given that future scholars will presumably redescribe the Sophists in their own partisan and contingent terminology, one anchored in their interests and beliefs. But it is to assert that Schiappa self-deceptively identifies his own linguistic categories and commonplaces with "historical reality" itself, and that in so doing he reveals a reluctance to accept Protagoras' deeply unsettling suggestion that we, as situated and contingent human beings, are the sole measure of all things.

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