Discussion:
New Books in Classics
Jeffrey Haines
2014-10-13 13:19:18 UTC
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Gorgias Press is pleased to announce that the following title is now
available. As part of our holiday sale, all our Classics titles are listed
at 40% off now until the end of December.

1. Who is Afraid of the Rhetor? An analysis and exegesis of Socrates and
Gorgias' conversation in Plato's Gorgias
by Yosef Liebersohn

978-1-4632-0258-3
Hardback, 179 pages
Publication Date: August 2014

Regular Price: $169.00
Sale Price: $101.40

Weblink:
http://gorgiaspress.com/bookshop/p-60036-who-is-afraid-of-the-rhetorbrby-yosef-z-liebersohnbrgorgias-studies-in-classical-and-late-antiquity-16.aspx

Description:

This book concentrates on the conversation between Socrates and Gorgias
which takes place in the first part of Plato's *Gorgias*. Scholars writing
on the *Gorgias* have tended to concentrate on the following two
conversations held by Socrates with Polus and, especially, with Callicles.
This first, relatively short, conversation is usually taken to be a kind of
preface coming before Plato's 'real' philosophy. The present study
challenges this assumption, arguing that the conversation between Socrates
and Gorgias actually anticipates the message of the whole dialogue, which
concerns the essence of rhetoric and its implications.

The book moves along two parallel lines. One is philological, presenting a
painstaking analysis of the conversation between Socrates and Gorgias, and
revealing a Socratic technique so far undetected - 'the
associative-terminological method' - by which Socrates tries to teach
Gorgias. The second line arising from the analysis pertains to rhetoric
itself, which is found to be the first formal, and consequently neutral
art. That is to say that rhetoric, in its role as a new art, effectively
modifies the very notion of 'art'. One of its main consequences is a new
answer to the question 'who is to blame for misusing art?' Until this
dialogue there had been only two possible answers - the teacher or the
student. Now with the entrance of rhetoric into the family of arts, as a
formal and neutral art, rhetoric itself becomes a legitimate candidate.

Jeffrey Haines
Marketing and Editorial Assistant
Gorgias Press
954 River Road
Piscataway, NJ 08854

Tel +1 732-885-8900

Fax +1 732-885-8908

www.gorgiaspress.com


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