Hippias of Elis

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Hippias von Elis ( ancient Greek Ἱππίας Hippías ; * in the 5th century BC in Elis ) was an ancient Greek philosopher and sophist .

What is known about him today is almost exclusively taken from the representations in three dialogues of Plato , the Hippias Minor , the Hippias Maior and the Protagoras . Plato's portrayal has very strong caricatures . As with Plato, Hippias appears as Socrates' dialogue partner in Xenophon .

Life

Hippias, son of Diopeithes, often toured Athens , Sparta and other cities, where he represented his hometown Elis diplomatically. As a sophist he also gave lectures and gave lessons on these trips, which in some cases earned him a lot of money. As an encyclopaedically educated sophist, he seems to have dealt with all areas of knowledge of the time, such as astronomy , natural philosophy , geometry , mathematics , linguistics , mythology , the theory of art and music theory . He is also said to have written numerous writings, including poems , tragedies and dithyrambs . Xenophon described him as a man with “many-sided knowledge”, the Suda soberly states: “He wrote a lot.” Like other sophists, he considered it important to be able to appear in court, in the council and before the people's assembly and his ideas to be able to represent. Plato says that Hippias could say fifty names in the correct order if he had heard them even once, and that he himself made all the clothes and jewelry that he had once worn in Olympia .

Teaching

The collections

Hippias may have been the first occidental author of a kind of encyclopedia . He is credited with a work called the Collection ( Synagōgé ), of which only one sentence of the introductory chapter has survived . In this sentence Hippias expresses his intention to compile excerpts from older Greek and foreign language works and to arrange them according to the criteria of importance ( tà mégista ) and relationship ( tà omóphyla ). This is probably how an encyclopedic lexicon was created according to lemmas.

mathematics

After Proclus , Hippias also tried the three classic problems of ancient mathematics . To solve two of the three problems, the squaring of the circle and the three-part division of the angle , he and the mathematician Nicomedes invented the quadrix of Hippias named after him .

Ethics and politics

In the Platonic dialogue Protagoras , Hippias explains ethical and political views in a very short speech. Like other contemporary sophists, he places nature ( phýsis ) in opposition to the law ( nómos ) applicable in human society . If things are similar to one another, so be naturally; some people are by nature relatives, friends and fellow citizens. The law, on the other hand, is a tyrant of people and forces unnatural things from people.

In Xenophon's Dialogue Memorabilia , Socrates and Hippias talk about justice. Socrates is of the opinion that he who acts in accordance with the laws in force in the state is just, that is, that justice depends on acting in accordance with the law. This contradicts the views of Hippias, whereupon Socrates goes further and distinguishes the human laws from the divine laws. The divine laws are nowhere written down and cannot have been made by humans, as they apply all over the world and among different-lingual peoples. Examples of such universal laws are to honor the gods, to honor the parents and not to father children with one's own children. Using the last example, Socrates shows that breaking this divine law is followed by divine punishments. Regardless of all human laws and punishments, a child conceived between parents and children is always a bad child. At this point the conversation breaks off and Socrates closes with the reference that the legal and the just are one and the same for the gods.

reception

Overall, the impact of Hippias is probably shaped by Plato's bad opinion of the Sophists. "The majority of researchers tend [to] regard him as a polyhistor without a philosophical position of his own," which, however, is also due to the fact that only a few testimonies to his teachings have survived. Georg Picht called Hippias "the first intellectual in world history." He "knew a lot, talked about everything, taught everything (for high fees) - and believed nothing."

Attempts to reconstruct the collection

Modern researchers have tried to at least partially reconstruct the contents of the collection . In 1944 , Bruno Snell began to trace the presentation of Thales' teachings in Plato and Aristotle back to a common source. He and others did the same with regard to the Heraklitic river doctrine and the doctrine of water as the primordial ground, which went beyond Thales. After further attempts like this, in 1986 Andreas Patzer consulted other doxographs besides Plato and Aristotle and tried to reconstruct entire passages in the collection , including the lemmas under which these passages are said to have fallen. Patzer assumes the following lexical keywords in Hippias: "The water", "The eros", "Everything flows", "The one", "In the beginning everything was together", "There is no false statement", "Thinking is perception" , “Earth and Water”, “Love and Strife”, “The Division of the Principles of Being” and “Thargelia”. Hippias is said to have quoted Thales on the subject of "The Water", for example, but also Orpheus , Hesiod and Homer , and Heraclitus on the theory of the river, but also Epicharm and Empedocles .

Significance for the history of philosophy

Patzer tried to show that the ancient doxographies , that is, the ancient historiography of philosophy, is dependent on the work of Hippias. Ever since Plato and Aristotle wrote about their predecessors, the collections of Hippias are said to have served as a source of teachings that, like those of Thales, were established up to around 200 years before Plato. In the case of the Heraclitic doctrine, a reinterpretation could have occurred because Hippias may have already placed the Heraclitic doctrine of eternal becoming in the foreground instead of the Heraclitic doctrine of the unity of opposites.

literature

Overview representations

Investigations

  • Slobodan Dušanić: Hippias the Elean: the revolutionary activities and political attitudes of a Sophist . In: Aevum 82, 2008, pp. 41-50.
  • Andreas Patzer : The sophist Hippias as a historian of philosophy . Alber, Freiburg and Munich 1986.
  • Georg Picht : A writing by Hippias von Elis. The oldest representation of the pre-Socratic philosophy. 1951, In: Georg Picht: The foundations of the Greek ontology. Klett-Cotta, Stuttgart 1996, ISBN 3-608-91416-1 , p. 235.

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ a b c d e f George B. Kerferd, Hellmut Flashar: Hippias from Elis . In: Hellmut Flashar (ed.): Outline of the history of philosophy. The philosophy of antiquity , Volume 2/1, Schwabe, Basel 1998, pp. 64–68.
  2. ↑ Xenophon, Memorabilia 4,4,6.
  3. ^ Suda, entry Hippias A1.
  4. ↑ Plato, Hippias Maior 304a-304b.
  5. ↑ Plato, Hippias Major 285e.
  6. ↑ Plato, Hippias Minor 368c.
  7. ↑ Clemens von Alexandria , Stromateis 6,15 = Diels / Kranz, fragments of the pre-Socratics 80B6.
  8. ↑ Proklos : Commentary on the first book of Euclid's "Elements" 272.7-272.10 = Diels / Kranz, fragments of the pre-Socratic 80B21.
  9. ↑ Plato, Protagoras 337d-338b.
  10. ↑ Uwe Wesel : History of the law. From the early forms to the present . 3rd revised and expanded edition. Beck, Munich 2006, ISBN 3-406-47543-4 . Marg. 124.
  11. ↑ Xenophon, Memorabilia 4,4,5-4,4,25.
  12. ↑ Georg Picht: Here and Now. Philosophizing after Auschwitz and Hiroshima , Stuttgart 1980, p. 251.
  13. ↑ Bruno Snell: The news about the teaching of Thales and the beginnings of the Greek history of philosophy and literature . In: Philologus . Volume 96, 1944, pp. 170-182.
  14. ^ A b Andreas Patzer : The sophist Hippias as a historian of philosophy , Alber, Freiburg / Munich 1986.
personal data
SURNAME Hippias of Elis
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Ἱππίας
BRIEF DESCRIPTION Greek sophist
DATE OF BIRTH 5th century BC Chr.
DATE OF DEATH 5th century BC BC or 4th century BC Chr.