Christopher Moore
Professor of Ancient Philosophy

I argue that what has been called the “Greek enlightenment” or the “Sophistic movement” – the later fifth century bce, during the lifetime of Socrates – represents the early decades of a new public intellectual sphere. This means a culture’s realization of people we would call “intellectuals.” I claim that intellectuals are people who articulate interesting reasoning about otherwise unexpressed or unexamined aspects of their work, and do so publicly – that is, with people who are not their fellow technicians or clients (i.e., not people directly involved in the practical consequences of their problem-solving). Such articulations of interesting reasoning, made coherent and cogent, I call “ideas.” So, a public intellectual sphere amounts to the institutions and personnel that conduce to intellectuals exchanging ideas with a receptive public. This sociology-of-knowledge approach to the history of philosophy helps us recast the period to which belongs the origins of many of our humanistic disciplines.