{"title":"Who Was Callicles? Exploring Four Relationships between Rhetoric and Justice in Plato's Gorgias","authors":"Richard. Johnson-Sheehan","doi":"10.5325/philrhet.54.3.0263","DOIUrl":null,"url":null,"abstract":"abstract:The Gorgias presents us with a mystery and an enigma: Who was Callicles? And, what was Plato trying to accomplish in this dialogue? While searching for the identity of Callicles, we gain a better understanding of Plato's purpose for this dialogue, which is to use justice as a means for staking out the boundaries of four types of rhetoric. This article argues that Plato uses the Gorgias to reveal the deficiencies of sophistic nomos-centered rhetorics and an unjust sophistic phusis-centered rhetoric, opening the door for a \"true\" rhetoric that he articulates in the Phaedrus and a universal justice based on virtue that he describes in the Republic.","PeriodicalId":46176,"journal":{"name":"PHILOSOPHY AND RHETORIC","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.3000,"publicationDate":"2021-10-06","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":"0","resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":null,"PeriodicalName":"PHILOSOPHY AND RHETORIC","FirstCategoryId":"1085","ListUrlMain":"https://doi.org/10.5325/philrhet.54.3.0263","RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"哲学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":null,"EPubDate":"","PubModel":"","JCR":"0","JCRName":"LITERATURE","Score":null,"Total":0}
引用次数: 0
Abstract
abstract:The Gorgias presents us with a mystery and an enigma: Who was Callicles? And, what was Plato trying to accomplish in this dialogue? While searching for the identity of Callicles, we gain a better understanding of Plato's purpose for this dialogue, which is to use justice as a means for staking out the boundaries of four types of rhetoric. This article argues that Plato uses the Gorgias to reveal the deficiencies of sophistic nomos-centered rhetorics and an unjust sophistic phusis-centered rhetoric, opening the door for a "true" rhetoric that he articulates in the Phaedrus and a universal justice based on virtue that he describes in the Republic.
期刊介绍:
Philosophy and Rhetoric is dedicated to publication of high-quality articles involving the relationship between philosophy and rhetoric. It has a longstanding commitment to interdisciplinary scholarship and welcomes all theoretical and methodological perspectives that advance the journal"s mission. Philosophy and Rhetoric invites articles on such topics as the relationship between logic and rhetoric, the philosophical aspects of argumentation, philosophical views on the nature of rhetoric held by historical figures and during historical periods, psychological and sociological studies of rhetoric with a strong philosophical emphasis, and philosophical analyses of the relationship to rhetoric of other areas of human culture and thought, political theory and law.