Gorgias and Plato

For Friday's class, I'd like you to go into the blogs of your classmates and find their questions about Encomium of Helen by Gorgias - pick three of these and respond to them in the comments of the individual blogs. The point isn't that you "answer" them - you may be as unclear about the issue as the blog writer is; rather, I want you to engage and explore them, suggesting possible approaches or even validating the complexity of the question by spinning off with other questions.

On Friday, we'll come at some of those questions directly, and we'll talk a bit about the larger questions about rhetoric and truth that the Sophists raised. As you read and think about Gorgias, you should also think directly about how you understand the relationship between language and truth, between language and reality, and what sort of expectations you have for discourse and argument to reflect what is "real" or "true."

The Sophists also were teachers - as I mentioned, this text represents a kind of argument for students to hire Gorgias for a rhetorical education.  Already this made them suspect in some people's eyes - you know how shady teachers are, of course - and add to that the fact that what they taught were ways of persuading people, ways to use language that could sway an audience, and you can see the problem, perhaps. It's like advertising to teach people about advertising, for money, at least from one perspective.

Also, for next Wednesday, I want you to read Plato's Gorgias, and you might want to start early because it is fairly long. It opens just after Gorgias has given a display of oratory in the house of Callicles, when Socrates shows up, late. Gorgias has a follower of his with him (Polus) and Socrates has one of his students (Chaerephon). This is a dialogue about the value of rhetoric, with Socrates working through the several participants one by one, beginning with Gorgias.  At the heart of this dialogue are several critical questions about rhetoric, such as:

• What is its use? Is it "good" to exercise rhetoric? What does it mean to teach people to be more convincing than experts on a subject?
• What sorts of things can rhetoric convey? Truth? Knowledge? Belief?
• Is rhetoric a moral enterprise?

This is, in effect, an attack on rhetoric, and you'll see in the basic formula giving rhetoric the bad name we noticed it had in class on Monday. 

I'll follow up with a more specific assignment around Gorgias following our discussion on Friday.