This paper argues that the Encomium of Helen must be seen as a speech about the value and importance of wisdom in human life and not as much as one as about logos. Gorgias sustains his vision based on a certain intellectualism which reduces moral faults to intellectual errors. This intellectualist program comprises a rationalization of emotions and a commitment with a certain tradition that discriminates between a minority with knowledge and a majority with only opinion. The consequence for Helen (...) is that she can be excused from her action at the expense of being reproached for her lack of wisdom and is thus relegated to the ignorant majority. Therefore, what is initially praise and an apology turns into severe blame. For this, I argue, the encomium can be qualified as an amusement (paignion). For the Encomium’s listeners the amusement becomes a challenge that demands they decipher the speech’s paradoxical character and appeal to their own wisdom to not be reproached like Helen. Thus the Encomium cannot be seen as a treaty nor as mere joke but rather as an intellectual agôn between the speech and the listener, which serves them “to arm the soul for contests of excellence”, as the epigram dedicated to Gorgias in Delfos says. (shrink)

In Gorgias Plato distinguishes empeiria and technê appealing to the notion of reason: Technê offers reasons while empeiria is an alogon pragma. But he links this criterion to the dichotomy of pleasure and good such that the field of technê is limited to good and the field of empeiria to pleasure. I focus on this connection showing its underlying assumptions. I propose to consider that the central dichotomy is that of pleasure and good and that the criterion based on reason (...) can be derived from it. For this I show that good and pleasure do not act solely as objects of technê and empeiria but rather are ways of reasoning and arguing. This leads to the redefinition of the concept of alogon pragma. it must be understood as an activity that is irrational to the extent that it creates pseudoreasons. The concept of Kosmos will be relevant in this context. (shrink)

Se analizan algunos usos del tópico de la política en el Menón, para mostrar que la virtud discutida es política, no sólo porque los interlocutores están interesados exclusivamente en la cualidad que debe poseer el gobernante, sino también porque tal cualidad consiste en una forma de autogobierno de..