sophist
/ˈsɒfɪst
/noun
1A paid teacher of philosophy and rhetoric in Greece in the Classical and Hellenistic periods, associated in popular thought with moral scepticism and specious reasoning.His mistress Aspasia and the sophist Anaxagoras were perhaps prosecuted....
- Twenty-four years earlier, Aristophanes in his play Clouds had lampooned Socrates as a sophist who taught his pupils to scorn parental authority and subvert civic justice for their own gains.
- Dion Chrysostom, Herodes Atticus, Aristides, Lucian, and Philostratus the Elder belong to the flourishing period of this second school of sophists, a period which extends over the entire second century.
1.1A person who reasons with clever but false arguments.Sept. 11 leaves the ‘moral equivalency’ muddlers exposed as sophists and charlatans....
- A few of the usual postmodern sophists offered up a few of the usual postmodern sophistries about perfect freedom and individual will.
- Sure enough, bylined sophists hit the Internet for descriptions of the machine.
Derivatives
sophistic
- Thinking is a big factor, be it sophistic or plainly dark.
- One scream and your sophistic notions crumble to dust.
- The traditional quality of Calliclean ‘natural justice’ is worth emphasising, since Callicles is often read as a representative of the sophistic movement and their subversive ‘modern’ ideas.
sophistical
- But I was being sophistical when I responded to their claims that our government is our enemy with that other cliché, you are the government.
- This is the truly disturbing and important story, replete with ironies and sophistical logic.
- The newspapers have at their disposal all manner of sophistical ways around this.
sophistically
- The gravest of them is, to argue sophistically, to suppress facts or arguments, to misstate the elements of the case, or misrepresent the opposite opinion.
Origin
Mid 16th century: via Latin from Greek sophistēs, from sophizesthai 'devise, become wise', from sophos 'wise'.