Gorgias (Plato)

A Platonic dialogue in which Socrates argues in turn with the visiting rhetorician Gorgias, his pupil Polus, and the Athenian politician Callicles over whether rhetoric is a genuine art or a knack for flattery, whether it is worse to commit injustice than to suffer it, and what a life is actually for. Callicles’ case — that conventional justice is a contrivance by which the weak restrain the strong, and that the naturally superior man should simply rule — is the most forceful statement of the position Plato spends the rest of the corpus answering. Composed in the fourth century BC; McCord’s list gives the author as Plato with no translator attached, and the companion entry “The Unity of Plato’s Gorgias” sits directly beneath it.

Why it’s on the list: It opens the curriculum’s classical Greek section, whose stated purpose is to “transcend the parochialism of time and place” — the competing Greek city-states as an early case of competing jurisdictions, and a source of very different ways of thinking about governance and society.

Where I saw it: Brendan McCord’s Philosopher-Entrepreneur Reading List, in the section on Classical Greek Political Philosophy. The full 211-entry transcription is on The Philosopher-Entrepreneur Reading List.

Connections

• Plato — the author.
• Socrates — the dialogue’s protagonist.
• Rhetoric — the art the dialogue puts on trial.
• The Philosopher-Entrepreneur Reading List — the curriculum this came from.