mindmap root((SOPH)) sophistry Cleverly deceptive reasoning or argument.
🌱For lawyers and politicians, the practice of sophistry from time to time is almost unavoidable. 🌳The Sophists were a group of Greek teachers of rhetoric and philosophy, famous during the 5th century B.C., who moved from town to town offering their teaching for a fee. The Sophists originally represented a respectable school of philosophy, but some critics claimed that they tried to persuade by means of clever but misleading arguments. The philosopher Plato wrote negatively about them, and the comic dramatist Aristophanes made fun of them, showing them making ridiculously fine distinctions about word meanings. We get our modern meanings of sophist, sophistry, and the adjective sophistical mostly from the opinions of these two men. sophisticated 1、 Having a thorough knowledge of the ways of society.
2、 Highly complex or developed.
🌱In Woman of the Year, Katharine Hepburn plays a sophisticated journalist who can handle everything except Spencer Tracy. 🌳A sophisticated argument is thorough and well-worked-out. A satellite is a sophisticated piece of technology, complex and designed to accomplish difficult tasks. A sophisticated person, such as Humphrey Bogart in Casablanca, knows how to get around in the world. But sophistication isn't always admired. As you might guess, the word is closely related to sophistry （See above,） and its original meanings weren't very positive, and still today many of us aren't sure we really like sophisticates. sophomoric Overly impressed with one's own knowledge, but in fact undereducated and immature.
🌱We can't even listen to those sophomoric songs of his, with their attempts at profound wisdom that just demonstrate how little he knows about life. 🌳Sophomoric seems to include the roots soph-,"wise," and moros,"fool" （Seen in words such as moron, so the contrast between wisdom and ignorance is built right into the word. Cambridge University introduced the term sophomore for its second-year students in the 17th century （though it's no longer used in Britain, maybe to suggest that a sophomore has delusions of wisdom since he's no longer an ignorant freshman. In America today, sophomore is ambiguous since it can refer to either high school or college. But sophomoric should properly describe something—wit, behavior, arguments, etc.—that is at least trying to be sophisticated. theosophy A set of teachings about God and the world based on mystical insight, especially teachings founded on a blend of Buddhist and Hindu beliefs.
🌱He had experimented with a number of faiths, starting with Buddhism and ending with a mixture of Eastern and Western thought that could best be called theosophy. 🌳The word theosophy, combining roots meaning "God" and "wisdom," appeared back in the 17th century, but the well-known religious movement by that name, under the leadership of the Russian Helena Blavatsky, appeared only around 1875. Blavatsky's theosophy combined elements of Plato's philosophy with Christian, Buddhist, and Hindu thought （including reincarnation）, in a way that she claimed had been divinely revealed to her. The TheosophicalSociety, founded in 1875 to promote her beliefs, still exists, as does the AnthroposophicalSociety, founded by her follower Rudolf Steiner.