If you've never read Plato, start with n  Gorgiasn. This extended dialogue lays out many of the foundational principles of democracy (and Socrates' fiercest critiques of its Athenian implementation) and its arguments maintain their relevance today, even as the democratic ideal lists ever more drunkenly toward a capitalist bastardization that suppresses more and more citizens, not least in these United States. Walter Hamilton's canonical English translation serves the material well, rendering among my favorite of Socrates' declarative statements: "...we should embrace pleasure among other things as a means to good, and not good as a means to pleasure." (Quoted from n  #SmallBooksMonthn)

Gorgias is another Sophist (after Protagoras) with who Socrates interacts along with Callicles. The dialogue is interesting in its premise: Plato essentially says that morality is greatly tied with afterlife - a reward for being 'good' in this life. This is essentially the root of the argument or what Socrates tries to qualify it as one while Callicles comes after him viciously.

While Protagoras retires from the argument (which goes nowhere), Gorgias simply doesn't participate. Gorgias being the seventh dialogue I've read, this is the first time when an interlocutor has abandoned the ship. Callicles however continues (as directed by Gorgias) the argument which I don't see Socrates really addressing it.

The good and evil, justice and morality make an appearance again with Socrates' well timed responses. It is still unclear if his answers really addressed Callicles' argument as Socrates deflects from the original question.

This dialogue requires a definite re-read just to ingest several metaphors that Callicles throws at Socrates. Socrates holds his ground for all its worth and I believe Plato is essentially telling the readers to get on with it and formulate a better response to Callicles' arguments.

A thorough enjoyable read and possibly one of my favorites of the dialogues till now.

Gorgias é um dos livros centrais de Platão. Nele, coloca-se o papel do filósofo diante dos sofistas e a ordem da alma como a fonte para se julgar a política. O verdadeiro estadistas não é o que atende aos desejos do povo, mas o que permite que o povo se torne melhor. A desordem de Atenas tinha chegado ao nível que um homem como Sócrates, que afirma sobretudo a verdade, não pode ser tolerado pois o jogo agora é de aparências, de retórica. Górgias e seus seguidores tentam afirmar a justiça como a vontade do mais forte, mas pacientemente Sócrates os fazem cair em contradições insolúveis e reconhecer, de má vontade, que não possuiam a verdade.

O livro termina com o mito do julgamento dos mortos, em que Platão afirma que não há como ter um julgamento perfeito na terra pois nos deixamos guiar pelas aparências. Apenas após a morte, despidos de nosso corpo, poderemos ser corretamente julgados por juízes que também abandonaram seus corpos. A nossa vida corporal é feita de aparências e, portanto, a única fonte para ordem pessoal está na alma.

Por tudo isso Górgias figura como um dos principais diálogos de Platão. Para ser lido muitas vezes.

Men do bad when they do what they merely think best, rather than what they most deeply desire.

That seems to be the central point of this long dialogue.

The age-old question is: how to get men to follow their true Will (i.e. Self, rather than ego).

Does the dialogue answer it?

The answer it gives appears to be: Engage in the combat of life, live as well as you can, and then, after death, you will attain the Islands of the Blessed, and not the realm of the wretched, Tartarus.

n  But that doesn’t answer the question of how to distinguish between the desires of ego, and the true Will!!!n

The Greek edition with commentaries by E. R. Dodds is the must-have for any student of Plato who would like to take the dialogue to the sheer extreme, even though you are just a dilettante of the Attic Greek language.

retorik yapma, adam gibi konuş

the book was incredible. it is so so complex and wonderful and yes. the summary mr. dickerson made us write, on the other hand, was a 13th reason if i’ve ever heard one.

Plato on the virtuous life
7 August 2011 - Athens

tIt is difficult to put a date of composition to such a text, though internal comments can assist us with determining when it was written. While I do not consider myself an expert on Plato, I would consider this text to be one of his earlier writings as he seems to be recording an earlier conversation as opposed to using Socrates to be a mouthpiece for his own philosophy. A lot have been written on Plato's dialogues, which tend to be philosophical discussions with Socrates as the main speaker. However, Gorgias is a dialogue, as opposed to a single person sprouting philosophy, that is a discussion between a group of people. This, I find, works a lot better for a philosophical treatise as one tends to get a broader view of the argument, and one also gets the opportunity of hearing the other sides of the argument along with objections and counter-arguments. This is not what one tends to get with a single speaker (or even a text book).

tPlato's later works tended to be more of a diatribe, where he uses Socrates as a mouthpiece for his philosophy (as can be seen in the Republic) however, there is another text, the Timaeus and the Critias, which seem to fall into the later category, though because Socrates is not the main speaker in these texts, I am loathe to put them into Plato's later category, and consider these texts to be more like the earlier texts where Plato is reporting a conversation that took place years previously (though scholars tend to date them as being one of his much later texts since the Critias is actually incomplete – not that a part of it is lost but rather that Plato never finished it).

tAnyway, I am writing on the Gorgias, which is a more simpler text than some of his other writings. The main theme of the Gorgias is morality (which is the theme of a lot of Plato's writings) and explores the question of whether oratory is a useful skill or whether it is just used for harm. The closest that we would get to the Sophists of Ancient Athens (and it is a very close comparison) is that of a lawyer. The job of a lawyer is to argue the client's case to either the other side or an independent third party. The criticisms of lawyers are very similar to the criticisms that Plato lays down with the sophists. One example is that the find sounding speeches of the sophists can easily override the technical knowledge of a doctor (and this can also be seen in today's society).

tThen there is the question of injustice and doing wrong to people. The two conclusions that Socrates reaches with his arguments is that nobody willingly does wrong, and it is better be wronged than to do wrong (though his companions in this discussion object quite readily, particularly when they use the example of the Tyrant that does wrong to his subjects, but does not appear to be living a miserable life, though Socrates does manage to convince his audience that the Tyrant's life is in fact miserable, even if he might not know it).

tThe concept of nobody doing wrong intentionally (which is also something that I disagree with, though there are people that commit a wrong but justify the wrong that they are committing, for instance shop lifting. The store sells the products at outrageous prices, and also rip their customers off, therefore they are right in stealing the pen, or the sales assistant that takes money from the till with the intention of paying it back, but never doing so). The conclusion that Socrates reaches is that people who do wrong are ill (in the same sense of having a cold) and they need to be cured of this ill, and thus Socrates sees punishment as the purpose of curing the person of their wrongdoing.

tHowever, the discussion comes to a conclusion with the exploration of 'heaven and hell'. In the Greek text, Heaven is referred to as the Blessed Isles, and Hell is known as Tartarus. It is interesting that Tartarus was designed to imprison the rebellious Titans, and the Blessed Isles have been set aside for the heroic and the virtuous. However, it is also interesting to note that Odysseus does travel into the underworld in the Odyssey and there meets up with a number of heroes from the Trojan War. It seems like their heroic acts simply were not good enough for them to get to the Blessed Isles (though I suspect that Tartarus and the underworld are two different places). It is also interesting to see how our culture has adopted these ideas, not in the sense of the Jewish idea of Heaven and Hell (with Heaven being God's domain, and Sheol being the abode of the dead), but rather, to an extent, to have merged Greek and Christian Mythology (in that Hell has been set apart as a prison for the Devil and his Angels, which is almost a direct copy of Tartarus, and Heaven as being the destination of the good and virtuous). However, nothing is all that cut and dried, and it appears that this is explained by Socrates in the end. The conclusion, it is better to live the suffering and virtuous life and be rewarded in the afterlife than to live a wicked life committing wrong and thus facing eternal punishment. Ironically, this conclusion seems to have been lifted straight out of the Old Testament.

“Pues si hay estas dos clases de retórica, una de ellas será adulación y vergonzosa oratoria popular; y hermosa, en cambio la otra, la que procura que las almas de los ciudadanos se hagan mejores y se esfuerza en decir lo más conveniente, sea agradable o desagradable para los que lo oyen. tPero tú no has conocido jamás esta clase de retórica.”

RIP platón menos mal que en Atenas no había podcasts

Too old to rate. Reading this in a yellowed library book, with edges of the pages flaking off and falling into my lap as I read, Gorgias made a strong argument, more unintentionally than intentionally, for the uselessness of rhetoric. Time has turned Plato's wisdom into despotism and Socrates' humility into a shield to hide his philosophy's flaws behind. Does Plato still offer anything to teach us today, not merely as history but as genuine philosophy? A lot of what he says are certainly good points -- for instance, that it's better to suffer evil than to do it -- but his reasoning seems shaky to a modern reader (or at least this one). Strangely enough, Plato's main value may be literary -- he does a great job of sketching characters simply by the way they argue.

I enjoyed Gorgias more than Meno, the other Platonic dialogue I've read, mainly because it seems like a more complete work and, unlike epistemology, modern science hasn't affected early thought about ethics or rhetoric much. Plato's brand of ethics is in many cases abhorrent to the modern min, but it was what every philosopher since has responded to, so it's important for anyone interested in the meaning of good to understand.

I can't believe I've had like eight years (or more) of consistent philosophical reading and never read this dialogue lmao.

On one hand, I can see why they executed Socrates. Moreso than in dialogues like The Republic and Meno, he really tears into people here.

On the other, he's so based. Like Oh My God, I'm not a fan of the whole like "watch this educated person DESTROY this guy who has no idea what they're talking about" content, but this Platonic dialogue is like the Platonic ideal exemplar of that type of content.

I really like Plato/Socrates' ability to have a completely bonkers theory that's also perfectly consistent. Very few philosophers due it like the OG.*

*He's not quite the OG, but the Western tradition treats him as such so allow me to call him so for rhetorical effect.

This dialogue, man. (Socrates, man.) What is going ON? I don't understand what Plato is doing to my brain, but I think I like it. I feel all twisted about when I read Socratic dialogues, like I'm pretty sure Socrates is right but he definitely made me violate some of my internal moral logic to get there. Probably. He also never answers his own questions (what is justice? how is the tyrannical soul different from the philosophical?). I am tempted to read Callicles as saying something Plato thinks, but he's for sure at least offering a critique of 'Platonism' as we typically talk about it that must be addressed for anyone desiring to call himself a Platonist. Why doesn't might make right? Outside of a Christian context that turns suffering on its head in the Greek philosophical tradition, I don't know how to answer that. I wish Socrates answered more clearly.

I don't know what to think about Plato, but I always like thinking about him.