Rhetoric has always had a bad reputation among philosophers. As far as we know, the first discussion of rhetoric in the history of philosophy takes place in Plato’s works. Plato accuses sophistry as possessing an attitude that contains rhetoric, and thus accuses it for having almost no philosophical value. However, Plato himself uses a kind of rhetoric in some of his works too — this rhetoric can be called a ‘true rhetoric.’ In this work, the notion of rhetoric is analysed (...) considering Gorgias, Phaedrus and Republic, and it will be queried as to whether the ‘true rhetoric’ of Plato is true enough. (shrink)

Name der Zeitschrift: Archiv für Geschichte der Philosophie Jahrgang: 99 Heft: 4 Seiten: 1-18.

El objetivo del presente trabajo es dar cuenta de la posibilidad de establecer una noción de culpabilidad y de reproche en relación al sujeto que actúa injustamente, mediante un análisis de la responsabilidad y castigo en el ámbito moral en el Gorgias de Platón. Para abordar este tratamiento, se profundizará en el intelectualismo moral socrático, según el cual los seres humanos no hacen lo que quieren, sino lo que consideran correcto. De esta manera, se dará tratamiento a cómo la influencia (...) de los apetitos y las pasiones desempeñan un rol fundamental en el dominio sobre sí mismo y, consiguientemente, en los diversos cursos de acción que los sujetos puedan adscribir. Finalmente, se establecerá cómo la educación y el conocimiento cumplen un rol sustancial al momento de la constitución de un juicio de reproche hacia el sujeto. (shrink)

In this piece, I propose a reading of Plato’s Gorgias that pays special attention to the role that the fictional audience plays in the unfolding of the dialogue. To this end, I use some of the insights that Chaïm Perelman and Lucie Olbrechts–Tyteca conveyed in their seminal work, The New Rhetoric: A Treatise on Argumentation in order to argue that thinking about the way in which Socrates’ arguments are shaped by the different audiences that Gorgias, Polus, and Callicles aim to (...) address and represent provides us with a new hermeneutical understanding of what is at stake in each of the different interactions Socrates engages in throughout the dialogue. In unpacking the way in which Socrates appropriates Gorgias’ particular audience, transforms Polus’ universal audience, and challenges Callicles’ elite audience, I provide an outline of the difficulties that Plato’s Socrates has to overcome in order to achieve the ‘community of minds’ that Perelman and Olbrechts–Tyteca identify as the bedrock of fruitful argumentation. Having done this, in the last section I turn to Plato’s Phaedrus, for the purpose of making evident that thinking about Plato’s deployment of rhetorical audiences is a crucial step in the effort to expose the implicit continuity that links the discussion of rhetoric delivered by the Gorgias to that of the Phaedrus. (shrink)

Does a τέχνη, qua τέχνη, need to be good-directed? On the basis of the Gorgias, many scholars have thought the answer is yes; I argue here to the contrary. There are, of course, many beneficial τέχναι, such as medicine and weaving; and there are even unconditionally good τέχναι, like the πολιτικὴ τέχνη; but Plato also happily construes piracy as a τέχνη in the Sophist, and, more normally, all sorts of neutral practices as τέχναι. In order to make this argument, I (...) provide a taxonomy of the different kinds of τέχναι and demonstrate that, across the corpus, there does not seem to be a good-directedness requirement. I then address the evidence of the Gorgias, where most commentators find a connection between τέχνη and good-directedness. I argue that this interpretation is incorrect, and that rhetoric in fact fails to be a τέχνη in the Gorgias solely because it is unable to give a rational account. A close reading of the Gorgias shows that this is a plausible interpretation, and comparison with the Phaedrus reinforces the point: in both dialogues, whether rhetoric will be a τέχνη or not hinges only on the question of rationality, not a good-directedness condition. (shrink)

Inspired by my reading of the conclusions of Plato’s Cratylus, in which I suggest that Socrates endorses the claim that speaker’s intentions determine meaning of their utterances, this thesis investigates a modern parallel. Drawing on observations that people who produce an utterances that do not accord with the conventions of their linguistic community can often nevertheless communicate successfully, Donald Davidson concludes that it is the legitimate intentions of speakers to be interpreted in a particular way that determine the meanings of (...) their utterances. This thesis investigates how we might interpret the non-standard utterances of another from the perspective of Davidson’s anticonventionalist picture of language. It proceeds by investigating the possible roles for radical interpretation and triangulation in explaining successful day-to-day communication, where non-standard language use abounds, and argues that - even from a Davidsonian perspective - a full account of the linguistic skills and knowledge that a language user requires to interpret utterances must ultimately appeal at least to regularities word use and expressions, if not full-blown conventions. (shrink)