Three more down

So, I've knocked out three dialogs since my last post.

First being Hippias Minor, or Hippias the Lesser, or On Lying, whatever you want to call it. Either way, it's about lying. Not so much the morality of lying, but about how knowledgeable someone has to be to be a good liar. Structurally uninteresting though. Sad, but true.

Next is Lysis, which is about what exactly friendship is. Again, structurally uninteresting. Atleast since it's only uniqueness when compared to the rest of Plato's works I've already found in Phaedo (granted Phaedo was probably written after Lysis)

And finally, the Symposium. It's about the nature of love, and the origins of Eros, who is either a God or a Demi-Godish creature depending on who in the dialog you listen to. It get's creepy because they talk rather frequently about how much they want to have relations with Socrates -shudder-. Anyways, the dialog seems heavily to have been an exercise in rhetoric for Plato, since each of the interlocutors use a long speech instead of the normal short question and answer method that Plato liked so much.

So, I'm done, but here is something interesting. It seems that some folks have done studies on the structure of known dialogs of Plato. It seems he used musical structure in his dialogs. I thought this was kind of cool, and might help weed out the true dialogs from the spurious. And so could the use of software that finds patterns in word uses by an author. Just a thought.

Have fun

Gorgias

Wow, sorry for the long wait folks. It was one of those things where life just kind of happens, I'd rather not get into it. Hopefully it wont happen again, or atleast not for awhile, or as long of a wait (a month, holy crap, that is unacceptable).

This time, I'd like to talk to you about Plato's Gorgias. The dialog is long enough to merit it's own book (instead of a dialog like Crito, where it amounts to a few pages in Microsoft Word). My copy is the Penguin Classic version. Now, I'm not going to advise anyone to buy book you can get for free (and with Plato, you can), but if you decide to pay for a free product, I would say this is the way to go. Why? Well, it's kind of nice to have the book broken up into sections about 6-10 pages long with a notes about what you're about to/just read. I think I bought it off of the borders website.

Before I get into Gorgias, let me just put out a general suggestion of shop around. I realized it cost me alot of money to buy the complete works of Plato off of borders.com and not shopping around, or just getting it for free. I did however wise up by the time I got to buying Kant and Hegel. So, that's better.

Anyways, back to Plato. Gorgias is concerned with (by and large) morality in power. The first interlocutor is Gorgias himself. His part is short, and he acts a bit like a MacGuffin technique. He just kind of starts it off, and gets hardly mentioned after. He takes on the view of the majority of Athenians, which of course helps support the existence of the Athenian Democracy. Plato was very much of a social critic, and I'd argue that criticizing Athenian politics was the thing he did the best at. Which means that Socrates simply obliterated Gorgias in the dialog, with no hope what so ever of survival.

Next was Polus. He diverts from conventional morality, but still tries to justify Athenian Democracy. He says that Gorgias was too easy in agreeing with Socrates, even though that ends up happening to him anyways. Oh, irony.

Finally is the longest section, Callicles. He claims that conventional morality are all used to usurp Natural Law, in which the strong rule the weak by right of force. He is unable to find a definition of strong and weak that will actually work, and the dialog goes from a dialog to a lesson on the failings of a Platonic Dialog. Callicles starts out polite, and quickly becomes a jackass. He insult Socrates, denies that inadvertently agreed with Socrates, and eventually refuses to answer or speak his own mind. He (at a point) simply refuses to answer Socrates' questions, to speed the dialog along to get Socrates to shut up. And claims that, even though he jumped into the discussion, he is only doing this to satisfy Gorgias.

All of this serves as a lesson on the strengths and weaknesses of Plato's method. In the beginning, Socrates is able to use logic and Socratic Irony to weaken, and even destroy his opponent. This sometimes leads to his opponent agreeing with Socrates (as in the case of Crito), Socrates and the interlocutor coming to a different but agreed position (I know it happens, but Ion is the only one I can think of at the moment), or (in the case of Gorgias) the two simply tossing there hands up and going away from each other. This one included a bit of the first and last. With Gorgias and Polus, the first. Callicles is able to create the third, but simply not answering. It becomes the ultimate dodge to superior logic. So, for anyone looking for a little bit of a self criticism of Plato, Gorgias is not a bad place to start.

So, yah. Have fun folks.