Develop an argument about Plato’s Gorgias;
Choose one work and explore one of the topics below.
1. Tradition: One challenge to everyone within a developing and changing society is how far to maintain the traditions of the past and how far those traditions need to be rejected or transformed. All of these works in different ways describe or advocate people severing themselves from some traditions of the past. Consider the following questions in the course of the paper: How far do they think tradition should be abandoned, and why? What are the problems that they think are posed by the tradition? How should such transformations be accomplished – by revolution, by peaceful reform, or something else? By what authority are these changes advocated – and why do they think that authority should be accepted?
2. Politics and art: Each of the works puts forward a political agenda, explicitly or implicitly. Some of them directly advocate a specific role for the artist in that; in other cases the work itself addresses political issues in ways which appear to be intended to have a political effect. Significant questions to consider are: How is the artist (understood broadly) portrayed in one of the works at hand, either explicitly or by way of analogy? What is the relationship between politics and art? What is or ought to be the role of art in a society? What role does the artist have in creating and maintaining political power?
3. Rhetoric: All of these works give a prominent role to persuasive speech, either through their direct inclusion of speeches in which people try to convince others of their position, or sometimes by actively discussing what the appropriate mode of persuasion should be. Significant questions to consider are: What is the author’s attitude to persuasion through rhetoric? What sort of effect does rhetoric have on its audience – and does that depend on who the audience is? What moral problems arise from the successful use of rhetoric? What about the times when people are unsuccessful in persuasion – what are the moral implications of that?
