_Draws out numerous affinities between the sophists and Socrates in Plato's dialogues._.

From the older handbooks to the more recent scholarly literature, Gorgias's professions about his art are taken literally at their word: conjured up in all of these accounts is the image of a hearer irresistibly overwhelmed by Gorgias's apagogic and psychagogic persuasions. Gorgias's own description of his art, in effect, replaces our description of it. "His proofs... give the impression of ineluctability" . "Thus logos is almost an independent external power which forces the hearer to do its will" . "Incurably (...) deceptive," logos has an "enormous power" that acts upon opinion, which is "easy to change" . Surprisingly, the urge to describe or paraphrase Gorgias's art has caused commentators to overlook the very best witness of it that we have: its enactment, which is to say the performative value of Gorgias's writings, especially the speeches. For if Gorgias's literary remains do nothing else, they demonstrate how one can do things with words without being explicit about what is being done, even if this means contradicting, performatively, what is being said-as for instance in his statements, so unconvincingly made, about the ostensible aims of rhetoric. Was Gorgias persuasive in practice? Was persuasion even the goal? Is logos the solitary arbiter of reality that it is so often made out to be? Through close examination of Gorgias's Helen and parts of On Not-Being, I attempt to show that persuasion is manifestly not the goal of his arguments, which in the first instance are aporetic paradoxes that expose the difficulties of defining the nature of either language or reality, and which in the last instance are instruments of cultural demystification. The only deception at work in Gorgias's writings is that of the self-deception of their audience. It is this that gives these curiously revealing documents of fifth-century Greek culture their "dissuasive," not persuasive, character. (shrink)

The paper offers an analysis of Protagoras’ fr. DK 80 B 1 and rejects the traditional reading of Protagoras as relativist. By considering the ipsissima verba that Protagoras makes use of in his passage, it is argued that alternative interpretations are possible, of which epistemological reism and psychological individualism are proposed. On a more general level, it is discussed to what extent Protagoras’ fragment contains descriptive rather than normative claim.

Near the beginning of the Cratylus (385e-387d) Plato's Socrates argues, against his friend Hermogenes, that the standards of correctness for our use of names in speech are in no way up to us. Yet this conclusion should strike us, at least initially, as bizarre. After all, how could it not be up to us whether to call our children by the names of our parents, or whether to call dogs “dogs“? My aim in this paper will be to show that, (...) although Plato's argument does not succeed in establishing this apparently bizarre conclusion, it may well succeed in establishing an equally momentous conclusion: that the standards of correctness for our use of concepts in thought are in no way up to us. (shrink)

This paper offers an innovative interpretation of Socrates’ disavowal of being a teacher as well as a new way of understanding Plato’s depiction of sophistry. The author identifies two different types of sophists, forthrightly frivolous sophists and slyly flattering sophists, in order to compare the pedagogical methods and political motives of each of these two types of sophists with those of Plato’s Socrates. In the course of this comparison it is made clear that Socrates endeavours to be not a teacher (...) but a ‘cowherder’, to use Plato’s agricultural hunger imagery. He rejects the conventional pedagogy that endeavours to ‘feed’ information to students. Instead he fosters learning by putting students in a position to think ideas through for themselves, just as a cowherder puts the herd out to graze in the pasture. This pedagogy alone has the potential to produce citizens who assume responsibility for their own education. (shrink)

Translation from classic greek of Gorgias Leontini´s Treatise of Not-Being.Tradução a partir do grego clássico do Tratado do Não-Ser, de Górgias de Leontinos.