Matveychev O.A. On the approaches towards study of the Ancient Greek sophistry

Abstract: A Special attention in this article is given to the study of the Ancient Greek sophistry established by the XIX-XX century. The author underlines that there is a consensus of indifference and neglect within the historical-philosophical science with regards to the sophists. The two different ways of reconstruction of the “systems” and outlooks, existed at that time in philosophy, are being proposed. The first way consists in the reconstruction of the teacher “system” through the follower; and the second way consists in the in-depth interpretation of the present fragments, which tries to leave the vulgar interpretations, emerging from the initial orientation on the primitivism of the Greeks, outside the framework. Thus, we can build a genealogical tree of the early Greek philosophers. The main conclusion lies in the fact that over the last decades the attempts were made in rehabilitation of the sophists. In particular, such attempt was made by Barbara Cassin, but her post-modernist approach cannot be fully recognized as satisfactory, because she rejects the ontology of the sophists in favor of the rhetoric. The author comes to an understanding that the sophists give us a so-called “ontology of imagination”, a more initial ontology, than the ontology of traditional metaphysics with its millenary separation into “visible and invisible”, into the “world of senses and world of ideas”.

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