Athenians Lost Their Moral Bearings and Sensation of Political Reality

Sophists cast an epistemic fog over entire societies, as plato says happened in athens before the peloponnesian war. Reverence for spurious wisdom made athenians lose their moral bearings and sense of political reality. In plato's phidrus, socrates describes how misplaced trust in reputation can corrode people's natural capacities to discern simple truths.