Gorgias

c. 483 - c. 376 BCE · Greek (Sicilian, of Leontini) · Sophistic philosophy, rhetoric, philosophy of language, epistemology, ethics of persuasion

Speech is a great potentate, who with the smallest and most invisible body achieves the most divine deeds.

When Gorgias arrived in Athens in 427 BCE as ambassador for his Sicilian city, he left without resolving the crisis but having ignited an intellectual one. His speech — antitheses with surgical precision, clauses chiming against each other, rhyming endings turning argument into incantation — was unlike anything the Athenians had heard. He spent the next half-century teaching, living, the tradition said, to one hundred and eight.

Topics Gorgias addresses

• logos as dynamis
• the three theses of On Non-Being
• the Encomium of Helen
• the Defense of Palamedes
• the pharmakon comparison
• apate and willing deception
• kairos
• to prepon
• eikos
• the four-cause defense structure
• doxa and the limits of episteme
• rhetoric as techne
• thelxis and goeteia
• the soul-affect doctrine
• antithesis and isocolon
• homoioteleuton
• response to Parmenidean monism
• the relation of logos to pragmata
• Palamedes as the wrongly-accused
• rhetorical realism on truth
• the Plutarch tragedy fragment
• Plato's critique of rhetoric
• the pedagogical lineage to Isocrates
• relation to Empedocles

Converse with Gorgias on Symposium. Every reply is grounded in Gorgias's own writing and cites the page it came from. The corpus is public-domain text.