So far, the question has increasingly been directed toward the world.
With the pluralists and atomists, nature has become something like a field of constrained possibilities. Things can combine, separate, move, interact and transform, but not arbitrarily. The possible has a structure.
Yet there is a question that has been waiting in the background.
What about the beings who are asking all these questions?
The Greeks had never ignored human beings. Poetry, law, religion, politics and tragedy had long concerned themselves with human action and human fate. What changes in the fifth century BCE is not that the human suddenly becomes interesting.
Rather, the human becomes increasingly difficult to leave out of the question.
And once that happens, something important changes.
The inquiry that had been directed toward nature begins to turn upon the conditions of human knowledge, language, action and judgement.
The question becomes reflexive.
The human as a problem
The Sophists occupy an important place in this transition.
They are often presented as the enemies of philosophy: rhetoricians who cared more about persuasion than truth, teachers who charged money for instruction, relativists who undermined certainty.
That picture is too simple.
The Sophists belonged to a world in which public speech had become extraordinarily consequential. In the democratic institutions of the Greek polis, political and legal decisions could depend upon the ability to argue, persuade and respond. Questions of justice, law, education and civic competence were no longer merely matters of inherited authority.
They had become matters for public contest.
This created a new conceptual environment.
If arguments can persuade different audiences, what makes an argument good?
If different communities have different customs, what makes something just?
If language can make the same matter appear differently, what is the relationship between language and reality?
If human beings can be educated into different ways of thinking and acting, what is knowledge?
These are not simply questions about human psychology.
They are questions about the conditions under which human judgement becomes possible.
The turn toward the human therefore does not abandon the earlier philosophical project. It extends it.
The world had become questionable.
Now the questioner becomes questionable too.
Protagoras and the measure
Protagoras gives this turn one of its most famous formulations: human beings are the measure.
Whatever precisely Protagoras meant—and the surviving evidence makes certainty difficult—the statement matters because it shifts the location of the problem.
Instead of asking only what the world is, we can ask how the world is available to a human being as something known, judged or experienced.
This does not necessarily mean that reality is simply whatever an individual happens to think.
It means that knowledge cannot be discussed without somehow accounting for the knower.
A similar pressure appears in the Sophistic concern with convention and nature.
Some things appear to belong to physis, nature; others to nomos, convention, law or custom. But once the distinction is made, an enormous conceptual space opens.
Is justice natural or conventional?
Are political institutions expressions of human nature or historical arrangements?
Are values discovered or established?
Does language correspond to things, or does it participate in constructing the world humans inhabit?
The point is not that the Sophists answered these questions consistently. They did not.
Their importance lies partly in making such questions difficult to avoid.
The human world is not simply given in the way a stone might appear to be given.
It is organised through practices, institutions, conventions, language and persuasion.
Human beings inhabit a world that they also participate in organising.
That is a very different kind of problem from the problems faced by the Milesians.
When language becomes consequential
Language had, of course, always mattered.
Homeric poetry, religious formulae, political speech and legal language were already powerful forms of social action. But the Sophistic environment makes language itself increasingly visible as an object of investigation.
This creates another conceptual shift.
Earlier philosophers had used words to ask what the world is.
Now it becomes possible to ask what happens when words are used to make claims about the world.
The distinction is subtle but profound.
An argument can fail because the world is not as the argument says.
But an argument can also fail because its concepts are confused, its terms shift meaning, or its conclusion does not follow from its premises.
The Eleatics had already pushed thought toward this second possibility.
The Sophists bring it into the human domain of language, persuasion and social practice.
The question is no longer simply:
What is true?
It can become:
What makes something count as a claim to truth?
And that question leads directly toward philosophy's increasing concern with concepts themselves.
But before Plato, there is Socrates.
Socrates and the demand for an account
Socrates is difficult to reconstruct because almost everything we know about him comes through other writers, especially Plato and Xenophon, and because the historical Socrates cannot simply be identified with Plato's philosophical character.
Nevertheless, a recognisable pattern emerges.
Socrates repeatedly asks people to explain what they mean.
What is justice?
What is courage?
What is virtue?
What is knowledge?
What is piety?
And when someone offers an answer, Socrates asks questions about it.
The importance of this practice is not merely that Socrates was inquisitive.
It is that giving an account becomes part of what it means to know something.
Someone may behave courageously without being able to say what courage is.
Someone may make persuasive arguments about justice without being able to explain what justice itself consists in.
Someone may possess a skill without understanding the concept that supposedly unifies its instances.
The gap between knowing how and knowing what begins to matter.
This gives the question a new direction.
Instead of asking only whether a particular action is just, Socrates can ask what justice would have to be for particular actions to count as just.
Instead of asking whether someone is courageous, he can ask what courage is.
The question moves from the instance toward the concept.
Ignorance becomes productive
There is another important shift here.
Socratic ignorance is not simply an admission of defeat.
It can become a method.
To discover that one does not know what justice is may be intellectually more productive than possessing an unexamined definition of justice.
Ignorance creates a space in which inquiry can occur.
This resembles something we have already seen.
The Eleatic arguments created constraints by showing that certain ways of thinking about being and change generated difficulties.
Socratic questioning creates constraints by exposing contradictions, ambiguities and unsupported assumptions in human claims.
In both cases, a question becomes productive because an apparently adequate answer no longer holds.
But there is a difference.
The earlier philosophers were largely asking what reality must be like.
Socrates asks what we must be able to say if our claims about reality—or about ourselves—are to make sense.
The questioner has entered the field.
From nature to practice
This also changes the kinds of things philosophy can investigate.
Nature remains important. But now justice, virtue, knowledge, education, friendship, rhetoric, law and political life become legitimate philosophical problems.
The human world is no longer merely the setting in which philosophy happens.
It becomes one of philosophy's objects.
And yet even that formulation is not quite adequate.
For human beings are not objects in the same way that atoms or elements are objects.
They interpret.
They deliberate.
They make distinctions.
They respond to reasons.
They alter their behaviour in response to accounts of what they ought to do.
A philosophical account of human action can therefore become part of the very world it describes.
The conceptual ecology begins to acquire a reflexive character.
A concept of justice can change how people understand justice.
A theory of education can change educational practice.
An account of political legitimacy can become part of political argument.
An argument about virtue can alter the standards by which virtue is judged.
The question does not merely describe its object.
It can participate in changing the conditions under which the object exists as a social reality.
That possibility will become increasingly important.
The discovery of disagreement
There is another consequence.
Once human practices become objects of inquiry, disagreement becomes harder to dismiss as simple error.
Different cities have different laws.
Different cultures have different customs.
Different speakers can give competing accounts of justice.
Different teachers can claim to possess different kinds of knowledge.
The conceptual ecology therefore becomes more plural.
But plurality creates a new pressure.
If there are competing accounts, how are they to be evaluated?
If persuasion is powerful, is whatever persuades thereby true?
If customs differ, does justice become merely conventional?
If human beings are the measure, what happens to a reality that exceeds any individual perspective?
The problem is not solved by simply choosing one side.
Indeed, the very proliferation of alternatives makes the problem more acute.
Philosophy now has to ask not only what is the case? but also what distinguishes a better account from a worse one?
The question of explanation has become a question about the standards of explanation.
A new kind of reflexivity
Something has therefore changed since the Milesians.
At first, the world became questionable.
Then change became problematic.
Then permanence, number, argument and possibility entered the field.
Now the activity of questioning itself begins to become visible.
The Greeks are no longer asking only:
What is the world?
They are increasingly asking:
What can we know?What can we say?What counts as a good reason?What is justice?What is virtue?What makes an account adequate?
This is not yet the fully articulated philosophical investigation of concepts that we will find in Plato.
But the conditions for it are forming.
The human being has become both participant and object of inquiry.
And this produces a peculiar new possibility.
A concept can now be turned back upon the practices and assumptions through which concepts are used.
Knowledge can become an object of knowledge.
Language can become an object of reflection.
Justice can become something to be investigated rather than merely enacted or inherited.
The question can begin to question the questioner.
The next possibility
This may be one of the most consequential developments in the emergence of Greek philosophy.
The early philosophers had made the world available to inquiry.
The Sophists and Socrates help make the conditions of inquiry itself available to inquiry.
The result is not a rejection of the natural philosophers.
It is an expansion of the field.
The things that matter to human beings—justice, virtue, knowledge, language, persuasion—can now be investigated with something like the same seriousness previously applied to nature.
But this creates a further possibility.
If we can ask what justice is rather than merely whether an action is just, then perhaps the concept of justice itself can become an object of inquiry.
If we can ask what knowledge is rather than merely whether someone knows something, then perhaps knowledge can itself become a philosophical problem.
The question has turned toward the human.
And in doing so, it has begun to turn toward the concepts through which the human understands the world.
The next question is no longer simply what things are.
It is what the concepts by which we ask what things are might themselves be.
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