Plato’s Gorgias, on Rhetoric (Live Reading)

Gorgias and the Uses of Rhetoric and Pleasure:

Scholarly consensus places the Gorgias late in the first period of Plato's dialogues and possibly even after his visit to Sicily. Therefore a date of c. 385 BC is highly plausible. The philologists of the Hellenistic era provided a subtitle "On Rhetoric" and even though Gorgias is certainly about rhetoric, it is also about pleasure and individual ambition combined with a through and aggressive critique of Athenian politics.

As opposed to Plato's more polite and urbane dialogues, Gorgias is full of bitterness and passionate argument. The dramatis personae can be very dismissive of each other, even more so than the confrontational figures in Protagoras. This is only to be expected, since what is at stake is rhetoric's relation to both persuasion and pleasure and the way this impacts personal well being, social relations and the political constitution.

Gorgias of course is not the typical sophist, because he does not really think that virtue can be taught. Perhaps the most notable figure in the dialogue is out of Callicles, whose views clearly foreshadow both Hobbes and Nietzsche in his contempt for the Common Man. Leo Strauss, one of the greatest philosophers of 20th century, derived many of his sharpest insights from this dialogue and gave a series of lectures.

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This is a live reading of the Gorgias. This Plato group meets on Saturdays and previously read the Critias, Laches, Timaeus, and other works. The reading is intended for well-informed generalists even though specialists are obviously welcome. It is our aspiration to read the Platonic corpus over a long period of time. The host is Constantine Lerounis, a distinguished Greek philologist, author of Four Access Points to Shakespeare’s Works (in Greek) and Former Advisor to the President of the Hellenic Republic.

The text can be found here:
https://cloudflare-ipfs.com/ipfs/bafykbzacebftrphnhiklob2alp5p4u6c2uisnqd3k6c5psolnz6fgg66ylpg6?filename=[]%20Plato%20-%20Gorgias%20(Hackett%20Classics)%20(1987,%20Hackett%20Publishing%20Company,%20Inc.).pdf