IPC2024

Keynote Speaker

This Means War! Plato’s Second Defense of Socrates

Plato’s Gorgias is an early or Socratic dialogue unlike any other: it is long rather than short; long-winded rather than terse; assertive rather than investigative; combative rather than cooperative; and in short, polemical rather than irenic. How can we understand it? In the dialogue there are echoes of works by two contemporaries of Plato, Polycrates and Isocrates, dating from the period 392-390 BC. While Plato and other Socratics were defending Socrates’ memory after his execution in 399, these sophists attacked Socrates and his followers on the basis of his politics and his methods. Having published the authoritative defense of his master in The Apology of Socrates, Plato was compelled to defend him again. This time he has Socrates take off the comic mask and tell us what he was really doing.