- Athenian aristocrat deeply skeptical of democracy in part because he blamed the execution of his mentor Socrates on the changeable masses or demos
- He may have been right that Socrates's execution was mostly politically fueled. Socrates was old and withdrawn from public life when he was sentenced to death for corrupting Athenian youth. Some of his pupils in the past had lead anti-democratic governmental coups, and his execution may have been intended as a message to others not to try such things again.
- Argued that objective truth existed in a fixed form, and thus was unlike changeable belief or convention
- Argued that public life should be governed by philosopher kings who, by virtue of their greater ability, had knowledge of truth
- Tended to lump all people who used words for effect, such as sophists and politicians, into the same rotten basket
- Plato never acknowledges that he is precisely one of these people or that his dialogues are exactly the kind of word manipulation he decries. Commentators from Cicero onward have pointed out this seeming hypocrisy. In this way he is like the politician who claims not to be a Washington insider, or the lawyer who states that he doesn't know much about fancy book learning but is steeped in good old fashioned common sense. There is also a parallel to "Against the Sophists," in that Isocrates also attempts to draw a distinction between good sophists (himself) and bad sophists (other for-pay teachers).
- Feared that rhetorical training would allow the masses to gain political power which should be reserved for the right sort of people
Gorgias
- Three interlocutors
- Gorgias: Most pejorative depiction of sophistry—the ability to persuade whether or not you know what you're talking about. Reluctant to articulate what rhetoric is.
- Gorgias oddly agrees that rhetoric only concerns political and legal speech, not language in general
- Polus: Socrates claims that having the power that rhetoric bestows is bad if it is used unjustly. Doing unjust things damages the soul.
- Callicles: Appeals to the true natural law of the strong asserting power over the weak. Claims that morality is a self-interested invention of men rather than decreed by the gods. It restrains the naturally superior.
- Socrates counters that Callicles is still a slave to his desires and the approval of the mob, and that his actions hurt his soul (keep in mind this is a pre-Christian text and this argument wouldn't necessarily have popular assent)
- Callicles doesn't buy Socrates's line and never capitulates to him
- Socrates stacks the deck by only allowing people to respond with yes or no, removing the ability to deal in probabilities (although Socrates still does so when it suits him)
- The famous connection between true and false arts (articulated by Socrates during Polus's section):
True arts
| |
Body |
Soul |
| Maintain | Gymnastic | Legislation |
| Restore |
Medicine | Justice |
False arts
| |
Body |
Soul |
| Maintain |
Cosmetics |
Sophistic (deliberative rhetoric) |
| Restore |
Cookery |
Rhetoric (forensic rhetoric) |
Phaedrus
- The soul consists of three parts:
- that which seeks the noble
- that which seeks the base
- that which should govern the other two (wisdom)
- Wisdom is gained through a kind of persuasive erotic
- but one in which the base desires are governed (Platonic love)
- It takes two and functions through dialectic; there's no autonomous path to truth (Descartes will much later assert that autonomy is the only path to truth)
- A true rhetoric is persuasive and truth-seeking. Its task is to study the different types of soul and the logical arguments that suit them
- Plato's Socrates has problems with writing (although we know them both through it)
- it's fixed (can't answer questions)
- it's false memory
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