September 14
Monday, September 14, 2026Plenary
The Challenge of Callicles
Given that we have these desires, what do we do with them? Would fulfillment of your desires amount to your vision of a good life? How should one pursue one’s desires? As a starting point, we will look at the view of a character in Plato’s Gorgias named Callicles. Callicles seems to view happiness in terms of pleasure and the fulfillment of one’s desires, and extends this to claim that we are happier if we have stronger desires (so long as we are able to fulfill them). Power is the ability to experience maximal pleasure by satisfying our most intense desires, and rhetoric (the ability to persuade others to do what one wants) is the most powerful tool for gaining and exercising power. Socrates raises a number of critical questions about this vision, and claims that the fundamental choice a person faces in life is between this "rhetorical" way of life and the life of philosophy.
- Be familiar with Callicles’ view of the good life, and aware of the alternative Plato develops (through Socrates) in the Gorgias
- Understand the ways in which Socrates challenges Callicles’ position, the issues addressed in their discussion, and what this reveals about the sophistic/rhetorical orientation
- See how to make explicit objections and arguments out of text from a Platonic dialogue
- Appreciate why Plato views the choice between philosophical and rhetorical/sophistic lives as the fundamental choice in how to live
Before Class
- Plato’s Gorgias, Great Speech of Callicles and initial discussion with Socrates — read in Perusall, making at least three comments or replies to someone else’s comment or question
- Trevor Newton, “A Summary of Plato’s Gorgias” — this is required background reading, but you do not need to comment on it in Perusall
- Optional: read entire dialogue from beginning — warning, it’s long!
- Complete the Mapping Desires Exercise and upload an image of your map to this Google Form before 10am on the day of today’s class (September 14); you’ll be considering your desire map further in your breakout class later this week.
- Try to summarize, in a sentence or two, Callicles’ view of the good life.
- Enumerate the concerns Socrates brings up about Callicles’ view.
- Read the passage about the scratcher and the catamite. What seems to be the point of these examples?
After Class
- Slides for today’s lecture
- Alasdair MacIntyre, “The Gorgias,” chapter from A Short History of Ethics
- How to cite passages from a Platonic dialogue (and what those numbers in the margins are): Stephanus numbers