Dissoi logoi

Abstract

Dissoi logoi (twofold arguments) refers to an anonymous sophistic text as well as to a relativizing technique, supposedly of sophistic origin, of arguing both sides of an issue. The text known as Dissoi logoi covers a wide range of issues central to intellectuals between the mid‐fifth and the mid‐fourth century bce : good and bad, seemly and unseemly, just and unjust, truth and falsehood, predication and being, the teachability of virtue, the appointment of state officials, and the arts of argument and memory. These issues, which later intellectuals classified under separate disciplines like “philosophy,” “rhetoric,” “dialectics,” and even “metaphysics,” are treated here as the concern of a single art of speech, argument, and reason, an art labeled logôn technê . Towards the end of the twentieth century, scholars began to use the words “ dissoi logoi ” to denote various methods and assumptions, which they believed characterized both this and other sophistic texts.