This afternoon, I shall give the fifth of six lectures on
Plato’s dialogues, this one on the Gorgias. Out of curiosity, I looked back over my
extensive files of the courses I have taught during my long career, and found
that I first taught the Gorgias in
the Fall of 1955 as a twenty-one year old Teaching Fellow in Harvard’s
Philosophy 1. There were four Teaching
Fellows in the course taught by the grand old man of the department, Raphael
Demos. Each of us covered two sections. In my file for the course was a copy of the
mimeographed sheet listing the questions each of us posed to his sections on
the mid-term hour examination. Mister
Raymond, Mr. Schiller, and Mr. Chacon asked serious, probing questions,
suitable for so elevated a subject. Then
there was me. Here is my first question:
There once was a rhetorical man
Who said, “Flatter the public I can.”
He boned up on knick-knackery,
All four forms of quackery,
And for Ruler of Athens he ran.
Outline Plato’s theory of true and false arts, and explain
how a false politician would use the “knacks” to gain power in a state.
Ah, those were the days.
I regularly teach this Dialogue as part of my 'Why Be Moral?' course. Obviously this one of Plato's greatest dialogues, though as ever 'Socrates' wins the debate by the kind of sophistical trickery he condemns in his interlocutors. However there is a burning question to which nobody knows the answer. What exactly does the beautician do for his clients to fake the the appearance of what the trainer does for *his* clients? Fake tans is a possibility but another is body shading to give the beautician's clients illusory muscle definition.
ReplyDeleteI took this to our classics department several years ago but their answers were pretty speculative.
What other books do you read in the Why Be Moral course?
ReplyDelete