Counter-Currents
Seated Socrates, fresco from ancient Ephesus
406 words
Every educated person should be familiar with Plato, but higher education today is usually a barrier to understanding the great thinkers of the past. Hence the need for Counter-Currents, which Jonathan Bowden described as an online university of the Right.
In the next five Saturday Counter-Currents Radio livestreams (June 24 and July 1, 8, 15, and 22), Greg Johnson will lecture on Plato’s dialogue Gorgias. The theme of the course is “Might vs. Right.” He will be using Donald J. Zeyl’s translation of the Gorgias published by Hackett as both a separate book and as part of their Plato, Complete Works volume. You can use other translations, because all Plato translations have a standard citation format known as Stephanus numbers, which appear in the margins of each translation. There are many free online translations, for instance this one at Archive.org. The first lecture will both introduce the dialogue as a whole and also examine Socrates’ argument with the great Sophist Gorgias, which ends at Stephanus number 466a.
The streams will start at noon Pacific, 3pm Eastern Standard Time, 8pm UK time, and 9pm Central European Time on:
DLive: https://dlive.tv/Counter-Currents
Odysee: https://odysee.com/@countercurrents/ccradio
Send questions & donations to Entropy: entropystream.live/countercurrents
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2 comments
That should be an interesting one. I’ve read it, and my take is that Gorgias was the first postmodernist.
This is a short paragraph, part of Polus’ discourse (from an unremarkable translation). “What do you mean? If a man is detected in an unjust attempt to make himself a tyrant, and when detected is racked, mutilated, has his eyes burned out, and after having had all sorts of great injuries inflicted on him, and having seen his wife and children suffer the like, is at last impaled or tarred and burned alive, will he be happier than if he escapes and becomes a tyrant, and continues all through life doing what he likes and holding the reins of government, the envy and admiration both of citizens and strangers? Is that the paradox which, as you say, cannot be refuted?”. I don’t understand how Socrates can argue against Polus’ argument here, unless you define happiness as a quality of the soul, and you also assign the soul the quality of eternal existence, quite independently of our physical existence on this planet. Unless we accept that the soul is some sort of eternal entity that somehow falls asleep when we are born and wakes up when we die (and during our life we just experience a feeble echo of it), I consider Polus ‘ argument irrefutable, and Socrates ‘ argument untenable. Maybe we’ll find a solution in the next lecture.
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