Plato's Gorgias depicts a conversation between Socrates and a number of guests, which centers on the question of how one should live. This "choice of lives" is presented both as a choice between philosophy and ordinary political rhetoric, and as a choice between justice and injustice. The essays in this Critical Guide offer detailed analyses of each of the main candidates in the choice of lives, and of how the advocates for these ways of life understand and argue with each other. Several essays also relate the Gorgias to the philosophical and political context of its time and place. Together, these features of the volume illuminate the interpretive issues in the Gorgias and enable readers to achieve a thorough understanding of the philosophical issues which the work raises.
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Provides diverse perspectives on the Gorgias' advocacy of a philosophical, just life as against a life of rhetoric and injustice.
Introduction Clerk Shaw;
1. Gorgias of Leontini and Plato's Gorgias Josh
Wilburn;
2. Ancient Readers of the Gorgias Harold Tarrant;
3. Philosophy and
the Just Life in the Gorgias Hugh Benson;
4. Socrates and Coherent Desire
(Gorgias 466a 468e) Eric Brown and Clerk Shaw;
5. The Ethical Function of
the Gorgias' Concluding Myth Nich Baima;
6. Shame in the Gorgias Olivier
Renaut;
7. Desire and Argument in Plato's Gorgias Frisbee Sheffield;
8.
Cooperation and the Search for Truth: Socrates and Callicles Terence Irwin;
9. Freedom, Pleonexia, and Persuasion in Plato's Gorgias Ryan Balot;
10.
Revealing Commitments Alison Murphy; Bibliography; General index.
J. Clerk Shaw is Associate Professor of Philosophy at the University of Tennessee. He is the author of Plato's Anti-Hedonism and the Protagoras (Cambridge, 2015) and a number of journal articles.
