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Columbia Encyclopedia entry: Gorgias

Gorgiasgôr'jēəs, c.485–c.380 B.C., Greek Sophist. From his native city, Leontini, Sicily, he was sent as an ambassador to Athens, where he settled to teach and practice rhetoric. Gorgias pursued the negative implications of the Eleatic school and asserted: (1) Nothing exists; (2) If anything does exist, it cannot be known; (3) If it can be known, the knowledge of it cannot be communicated. Objective truth being thus impossible, there remains only the art of the Sophists, persuasion. Such arguments undermined the foundations of polytheism and led to open challenges of current moral standards. His challenge to speculative thought stimulated a more sophisticated approach to the problems of philosophy. A dialogue of Plato's bears his name.

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Gorgias "the Nihilist", Greek sophist, pre-socratic philosopher and rhetorician, was a native of Leontini in Sicily. Along with Protagoras, he forms the first generation of Sophists. Several doxographers report that he was a pupil of Empedocles, although he would only have been a few years younger. "Like other Sophists he was an itinerant, practicing in various cities and giving public exhibitions of his skill at the great pan-Hellenic centers of Olympia and Delphi, and charged fees for his instruction and performances. A special feature of his displays was to invite miscellaneous questions from the audience and give impromptu replies." W.K.C. Guthrie,...more »

Columbia Encyclopedia search results: Gorgias

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Emmaus, in the Bible
Emmaus, in the Bible. 1 Place, outside Jerusalem, where Cleopas and another disciple met the risen Christ. 2 Place, where Judas Maccabeus defeated Gorgias. It is now called Imwas (West Bank) a...
Sophists
Sophists, originally, itinerant teachers in Greece (5th cent. B.C.) who provided education through lectures and in return received fees from their audiences. The term was given as a mark of re...
skepticism
Skepticism [Gr.,=to reflect], philosophic position holding that the possibility of knowledge is limited either because of the limitations of the mind or because of the inaccessibility of its o...
Plato
Plato, 427?–347 B.C., Greek philosopher. Plato's teachings have been among the most influential in the history of Western civilization. After pursuing the liberal studies of his day, he became...

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