In the reading about Plato, I was very interested in finding out more about what Plato believed rhetoric was and how these beliefs were portrayed in Gorgias and in Phaedrus. I found the Gorgias to be the most interesting out of the two dialogues, so I will focus the most on that one of the two.
In class the other day, we focused on the differences between the Sophists and what Plato believed to be true rhetoric, and saw that this reading almost mirrored that discussion. Plato was obviously against the Sophists and embodied the Sophists as Gorgias in the first dialogue. In Gorgias, Plato makes a statement about what false rhetoric consists of, while rather in Phardrus, he portrays what real rhetoric is (82).
I got out of the text that Plato believed into truth as knowledge rather than truth as belief. This means that according to Plato, something would be true whether or not a person believed it was true. This logic reminded me of the riddle, "If a tree falls down in the middle of a forest, and nobody is around to hear it, does the tree still make a sound?" If Plato were to answer that question, I believe he would say yes, the tree still makes a sound because it is true that trees make a sound when they fall down, ten times out of ten.
In contrast to this thought, Sophists did not believe that humans have the ability to obtain absolute knowledge, and concerned themselves with probabilities and things that according to Plato only had the appearance of truth (81). If a Sophist were to answer that riddle, they may say no, the tree may not have made a sound because we have no proof that sound still exists when we aren't around to hear it. Plato believed that rhetoric was absolute truth, regardless if someone believed in it or not. The sophists on the other hand changed this definition that rhetoric is only belief.
After getting in pairs during class today I thought about stasis theory and how it applies to Plato and the discussions that were going on in Gorgias. To me anyway, It seemed as if the arguments worked in the dialog because they could agree on what the disagreement was. The points being made weren't flying past one another without making any contact because they had things in common. It seems to me like philosophers are able to accomplish stasis, but I have yet to see it in the political world and hope that I someday do.
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