KLASYCZNI SOFIŚCI I PLURALIZM KULTURY DEMOKRATYCZNEJ
CLASSICAL SOPHISTS AND PLURALISM OF DEMOCRATIC CULTURE

Summary/Abstract: The sophists of Socrates’s times – contrary to Plato, the creator of political absolutism – are patrons of open democratic culture which is based on an anti-totalistic attitude towardsthe world and people. According to Protagoras, there exists no objective and absolute criterion of truth and falsehood because it is the individual human being that forms it. The sophists’ individualism is the philosophical basis and the essence of the pluralistic culture of democracy. The postmodern cultural formation is founded on the omnipresent art of persuasion, whose precursors were Protagoras and Gorgias. Signs of this art are visible in the development of practical rhetoric, political marketing and public relations. In today’s philosophy and other humanistic disciplines the greatest renown has been gained by those trends that base their systems on questioning objective truth (e.g. American neopragmatism, all postmodernist tendencies, Habermas’s philosophy of dialogue, Perelman’s theory of “new rhetoric”).

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