The Republic is an excellent resource for drawing a contrast between the rhetoric of the sophist and of the philosopher. Its first book includes a dramatic conflict between the sophist Thrasymachus and the philosopher Socrates, while its middle books provide a detailed account of the nature of each. The dialogue contrasts and compares them through both its drama and abstract descriptions. In this chapter, I argue that Plato develops his presentation of the philosopher and the sophist dialectically. The initial books deliberately set up Socrates to look a bit like a sophist and Thrasymachus to look a bit like a philosopher. While the middle books suggest that the philosopher and sophist stem from the same nature, Plato differentiates them by the philosopher's love of the forms and his possession of moral and intellectual virtues. However, because sophists do not even acknowledge that the forms exist, the philosopher is separable from the sophist only from the viewpoint of the philosopher. From the sophist's viewpoint, a philosopher is merely a deficient sophist. Philosophy is a normative rather than descriptive standpoint, grounded upon key moral and theoretical commitments.

This chapter proceeds in three main parts. First, I examine the way in which Book One presents Thrasymachus as similar in certain respects to philosophers and Socrates as similar in certain respects to sophists. Second, I trace the dialectical development of the philosopher and sophist from the Republic Books Two through Seven.