- Issues in the Gorgias:
- Is it possible to teach good speaking or persuasion without
teaching the
content of good speech?
- Is it possible to teach someone to speak more
persuasively about medical things than a doctor?
- If so, is it possible to teach that person to be
more
persuasive about medical things to an audience of doctors
than a doctor?
- about carpentry to an audience of carpenters?
- Is persuasive speaking a matter of systematic knowledge or
of a
good "feel" for an audience and good "conning" instincts?
- Is philosophy useless beyond simply developing mental muscle
for more important tasks?
- Is it right or wrong or neither to teach people to persuade
who don't know what is right or wrong?
- Can the teacher of a skill be held responsible for its use?
- Can the teacher of an idea be held responsible for it?
- Is skill different from ideas in that respect?
- Is it better to harm or to be harmed?
- Is doing wrong and getting away with it the worst
harm
that can befall one's soul?
- If one wants harm to come to one's enemies, should
one
hope that they do evil and get away with it?
- Is it better to refute or to be refuted?
- Is the absolute ruler actually powerful? at doing what? What
the ruler wants?
- What if the absolute ruler is the least likely to
know
what she *really* wants?
- poverty : financial condition :: disease : bodily condition
::
justice : condition of one's soul
- Is wrongdoing only wrong by convention, or is it also wrong
"by
nature" or "really"?
- Is the point of life fulfilling one's appetites and desires,
whatever they happen to be? and is the person who fulfills the
largest
appetites most fully the most successful?
- Can a person be mistaken about what they want? Even if they
are firmly convinced that they want something, can they be
mistaken?
- Is "true" politics a matter of telling people the truth or
telling them what they want to hear?
- Socrates says of his trial: "I shall be judged like a doctor
before a jury of children with a pastry cook as prosecutor"
- should that matter to Socrates?
- How can one benefit a criminal? Are there irredeemable
criminals?