Warburton has sufficiently exposed the sophistry of this theory; though I do not think him equally successful in what he substitutes for it.
It is surely unnecessary for me to warn you, that the argument, however specious, is a sophistical one; and the nature of the peculiar sophistry which it involves shall be afterwards pointed out to you.
If it were true (as has been said) that Mr. Bernard Shaw lived upon paradox, then he ought to be a mere common millionaire; for a man of his mental activity could invent a sophistry every six minutes.
Mere lightsophistry is the thing that I happen to despise most of all things, and it is perhaps a wholesome fact that this is the thing of which I am generally accused.
Science brushed aside all sophistry and became a reality.
Sophistry avails nothing here; a child, left in the woods, would be and remain a savage, matching his wits with gorillas.
In no department of human inquiry is there so much temptation and so much opportunity for plausible sophistry as in the now somewhat popular application of statistics to ethological problems.
For the sophistry does not always lie in the form, but often in the matter, in the premisses, and in the indefiniteness of the conceptions and their extension.
The most artful sophistry can not disguise the fact that the doctrine of moral depravity is a slanderous imputation upon divine mercy, goodness, and justice, and challenges not only his goodness, but his good sense.
No logic and nosophistry can resist this conclusion.
The school of Alexandria had its poets, its grammarians, and philosophers; but its poetry lacked the fire of genius, and its grammatical productions were more remarkable forsophistry and subtlety, than for soundness and depth of research.
This, in truth, Mr. Gladstone hardly ever did, and it was one of the reasons why he acquired a bad name for sophistry and worse.
Sophistry appeared to him to be like it, except that it is a fallacious deduction either from merely apparent probabilities in its matter or itself merely apparently syllogistic in its form (cf.
Sophistry of all kinds always has a powerful ally in man’s moral indolence.
Johnson, I have said, is wise without being poetical and Keats poetical without being wise; Sophocles is both poetical and wise, whereas Shelley is poetical, but with a taint of sophistry or sham wisdom.
A Socratic dialectic of this kind is needed at such a time not only to dissipate sophistry but as a positive support to wisdom.
We need to keep in mind the special quality of Rousseau’s sophistry if we wish to understand a very extraordinary circumstance during the past century.
Whether or not he was sincere in his sophistry is a question which the emotionalist is very fond of discussing, but which the sensible person will dismiss as somewhat secondary.
We may doubt whether if Shelley had lived longer he would ever have risen above emotional sophistry and become more ethical in the quality of his imagination.
Few men have had a firmer grasp on the moral law or been freer from the various forms of sophistry that tend to obscure it.
Sophistry flourishes, as Socrates saw, on the confused and ambiguous use of general terms; and there is an inexhaustible source of such ambiguities and confusions in the very duality of human nature.
Such a progress from emotional sophistry to ethical insight we actually find in Goethe; and this is the last and most complex case we have to consider.
The failure to discriminate as to the quality of the deed is responsible for the central sophistry of Faust (see p.
My whole aim has been to show that a main stream of emotional sophistry that takes its rise in the eighteenth century and flows down through the nineteenth involves just such a confusion.
It was this gigantic iniquity which created that arrogant class who have exhausted the catalogue of violence to obtain power and the lexicon of sophistry for arguments to extenuate the exceeding heinousness of crime.
Are not the poetic process and its sophistry clear?
The sophistry appears when we rectify the conclusion thus: one can inflict an immortal injury only on an immortal being.
In reference to this question it is sophistry to fix our thoughts on a Chinese city as crowded with nameless and indistinguishable human inhabitants as a decayed cheese is with vermin.
Its amazing sophistry can, however, be made apparent even to one who has never read the Iliad and the Odyssey.
The heartless sophistry of this reasoning--heartless because of its pitiless disregard of the burdens and sufferings of the poor women--is exposed in part by his own admissions regarding the selfish actions of the men.
The foregoing is quite sufficient to dissipate all the sophistry by which the canonists have sought to embarrass a question so simple in the estimation of all who are disposed to listen to reason.
Neither will you find any of this sophistry in the speeches of Cicero.
No other interpretation can be put on such expressions as the following, couched in terms whose meaning sophistry itself could not hide.
This is the broad, palpable fact, let sophistry disguise or evade it as it may.
All the sophistry of the Predestinarians rests on the false notion of eternity as a sort of time antecedent to time.
But Taylor was so acute a logician, and had made himself so completely master of the subject, that it is hard to conceive him blind to sophistry so glaring.
Bodin in thissophistry was undoubtedly insincere" (Hallam, Lit.
He had also acquired in no small degree that love of dexterous argumentation and verbal sophistry which was becoming fashionable in the Athens of the fifth century.
If he did remain in it, he was not merely mistaken, but dishonest, and sophistry could not purge him from the moral stain of treachery to the institution of which he was an officer.
In her left hand she bore the shield of Impudence, and the quiver of Sophistry rattled on her shoulder.
Over this law, indeed, some sons of sophistry have been subtle enough to throw mists, which have darkened their own eyes.
It is because men obey the dictates of passion more willingly than those of conscience, that they are more easily led by the factious sophistry of a Cleon than by the virtuous wisdom of a Socrates.
