This book explores how Plato separates the philosopher from the sophist through the dramatic opposition of Socrates to rhetoricians and sophists. In one way, its thesis is simple. Plato distinguishes Socrates from the sophists by differences in character and moral intention. In the broadest terms, Plato might agree with Aristotle's claim in the Rhetoric that what defines a sophist is “not his faculty, but his moral purpose” (1355b 17–18). In another way, the problem is difficult, for the philosopher and the sophist share many characteristics in how they speak and act; these similarities are not superficial but go to the very heart of what Plato presents as philosophy, sophistry, and rhetoric. The tendency of contemporary scholarship has been to emphasize the distinctiveness of Socratic or Platonic philosophy in terms of a technical method separable from rhetoric. One reason for this assumption is that Socrates seems to point toward the possibility of such a method in the Gorgias in his contrast between the political art and merely imitative rhetoric (Gorgias 464b–466a). However, when one turns to other dialogues, the relationship among philosophy, rhetoric, and sophistry becomes murkier. The Phaedrus seems to show philosophy and rhetoric as compatible, while Book One of the Republic presents a sophist with an intellectual position about justice alongside Socrates, with arguments that can seem sophistical. Plato's Sophist defines the sophist but, at one point in the dialogue, the Stranger equates “noble sophistry” with a practice that sounds much like Socrates' questioning activity (Sophist 230b–c).