Essay 1

First Essay:
Argument Analysis Assignment

Please write a 1000-word essay on the topic below. Your essay should be double-spaced with 1″ margins.

Due Saturday, February 8 (any time): please submit as a Google Docs document and upload here.

Formatting Instructions

Please include your full name in the title for your file, together with your section number – e.g., “Pat Smith Section 1”.

Quotations or other references to the text can be cited by putting the Stephanus number in parentheses into your text, like this: “Callicles claims that a person who lives without experiencing pleasure or pain is ‘living like a stone’ (494b).”

Topic

Plato devotes much of the Gorgias to exploring the role of pleasure in living well. Callicles in the dialogue takes an extreme hedonist view in identifying the happy life as a life of maximal pleasure. He makes this clear to Socrates at 491e–492c:

How could a man prove to be happy if he’s enslaved to anyone at all? Rather, this is what’s admirable and just by nature — and I’ll say it to you now with all frankness — that the man who’ll live correctly ought to allow his own appetites to get as large as possible and not restrain them. And when they are as large as possible, he ought to be competent to devote himself to them through his bravery and intelligence, and to fill them with whatever he may have an appetite for at the time. […] [T]he truth of it, Socrates — the thing you claim to pursue — is like this: wantonness, lack of discipline, and freedom, if available in good supply, are excellence (aretē; or “virtue”) and happiness (eudaimonia).

What follows in the Gorgias is an extended debate between Socrates and Callicles about the nature of the human good. At the core of this debate is a question about the “final end” (or ultimate goal) of a human life.

Socrates and Callicles agree that the final end of a human life — the human good — is happiness, but they disagree on how to define happiness. In the quote above, Callicles claims that happiness (and thus our final end) lies in a life of pleasure: the satisfaction of our most intense desires. Socrates for his part never really puts forward his own conception of happiness or the human good in the Gorgias; he just denies that the good is pleasure.

There are a number of ways in which Socrates attempts to refute Callicles’ hedonism at 492d–499b. Here are the highlights:

  1. The leaky jar analogy (492e–494a): Socrates claims that a life devoted to the constant pursuit of pleasure is a life spent in the endless satisfaction and spending of desires, and that such a person really “suffers extreme pain”;
  2. The itch-scratcher and catamite objections (494b–495a): Socrates asks Callicles whether he believes the life of a person who gets maximal pleasure from scratching an itch or the life of a catamite (a passive sexual partner in a Greek homoerotic relationship) lives well;
  3. The opposites argument (495e–497d): Socrates points out to Callicles that, whereas good and bad are opposites, pleasure and pain are not opposites; hence what’s good and what’s pleasant cannot be the same thing;
  4. The virtues argument (497e–499b): Socrates points out that, if Callicles is right, the life of a foolish or cowardly person is no less pleasant — and so, according to Callicles’ view, good — than the life of an intelligent and brave person.

Your task for this paper is to provide an analysis of one of the above arguments (1-4). For whichever argument you choose, you’ll need to do two things: (i) explain the reasoning of the passage and how Socrates tries to refute Callicles on the basis of this reasoning; and (ii) evaluate whether you find the argument a good one.

Further Instructions

  • Begin your essay with a brief introduction that states which argument you’re discussing and summarizes your evaluation of the argument. You can and probably should use the first person (e.g., “I will argue that Socrates’ argument is weak, because …”). Your introduction should be no more than two sentences.
  • Next, spend about 1 page explaining the steps of the argument, supported by clear references (using the marginal Stephanus numbers in the text). After noting the conclusion that Socrates wants, summarize his strategy in arguing for it. In this portion of the paper, instead of just paraphrasing the text, you need to reconstruct Socrates’ reasoning in the passage you’ve chosen. Identify the claims that Socrates makes and (where relevant) Callicles’ agreement to these claims, and explain what Socrates is getting at in your own terms. This can be done in the form of a numbered outline or in narrative form. Either way, you’ll need to make the reasoning clear.
  • After you’ve summarized your chosen passage, you should aim to spend the rest of the essay (about 2–3 pages) evaluating the argument. Do you find anything problematic in Socrates’ reasoning? Are all of the claims he makes in support of his conclusion clearly expressed? Does he make any questionable assumptions or moves during the course of the argument that Callicles is wrong not to call out? Alternatively, if you think the argument is a good one, elaborate on why.
  • Give your essay a memorable title!

Even if you’re confident about your reading and writing skills, crafting a good philosophy paper involves a significant amount of thought, planning, and preparation. You should not expect a decent grade on this assignment if you leave it until the night before it’s due.

For this reason, before you begin this paper, we recommend you consider the following pieces of advice in reading philosophical arguments and writing a philosophy essay: