[This text, written as a response to another paper and presented at the 16th Atlantic Philosophical Association

Conference at the University of New Brunswick, Fredericton (3-5 October 1985), has not previously been
published.]

[Index: Plato, Gorgias]

[Date: October 1985]

Misleading antilogik: A response to James Murray's

Disputation, Deception and Dialectic: Plato on the True
Rhetoric (Phaedrus 261-266)

Michael H. Keefer

My function here is vestigial in a double sense. The response to a conference

paper might be said to stand in approximately the same relation to that paper as the
appendix to the gut: the appendix can cause discomfort, even peritonitis, but provides no
special help in the process of digestion. Moreover, the practice of offering an oral
response to an orally presented argument is itself a vestige, bequeathed to us by the
universities of the Middle Ages and the Renaissance, of the scholastic arts faculty
tradition of the disputatio.
One may suspect, incidentally, that this tradition is in part responsible for that
identification of antilogik with eristik which James Murray, following G. B. Kerferd, so
ably undoes. For the disputatio amounted to a training in what was called dialectic, but
seems more often to have consisted of eristic combat. Logos was challenged by antilogos,
and the subjects under discussion included such questions as the following (paraphrased
from the Sophismata of Jean Buridan): If Socrates says, 'Plato should be cursed if he
curses me, and not otherwise,' and Plato says, 'Socrates should be cursed if he does not
curse me, and not otherwise,' does Socrates curse Plato? 1 Predictably, given that such
1 John Buridan, Sophisms on Meaning and Truth, trans. T. K. Scott (New York: Appleton-Century-Crofts,

exercises in modal logic were aimed at boys in their early teens, this antilogistic tradition
resulted in an effective devolution of logic into rhetoric. 2 As Peter Ramus, one of its most
famous products, wrote in the mid-sixteenth century, Bene disserere est finis logices:
Logic's chiefest end is, to dispute well. It may be significant that this definition is
derived from Cicero, who stands at the end of another antilogistic tradition, that of the
Platonic Academy.3 These historical devolutions of dialectic into dogmatic scepticism in
one instance, and into an art of rhetoric in the other, may have some bearing on Plato's
attempts to assimilate antilogik into a true rhetoric which will advance the cause of (his)
philosophy. Or are they merely misleading irrelevancies (apatemata)?
My function, I have said, is vestigial: an unflattering situation. And to compound
my problems, James Murray's paper, with understated skill, wedges its respondent into a
position reminiscent of the conditional curses of Buridan's sophism, or perhaps of the
paradox of the Cretan Liar. In order to properly discharge my antilogical function in this
vestigial disputatio, I should, after some initial gestures of insincere praise, oppose his
argument by (for example) demonstrating a convergence of antilogik with eristik in
Plato's textthus, effectively, playing Socrates to his Lysias. But since his argument
includes the claim that antilogik, properly used, is part of the true philosopher's
equipment, my antilogistic reasonings would, at the same time, define me as a rhetorician
rather than a philosopher, as Lysias to his Socratesor, in language suggested by Plato's
Sophist,4 as a magician, a poisoner, a pharmakeus, rather than a doctor of souls.
Which gives rise to a further paradox. For on the one hand, I believe Murray's
argument to be accurate and solidwhile on the other, I am in fact a rhetorician rather
than a philosopher. If I have not already given sufficient evidence of sophistic leanings, I
can cement the point by confessing that my quotation of Ramus was at second hand: my
source for it is Marlowe's Dr. Faustus, a pharmakeus if there ever was oneand who, by
the way, pretended to be reading from Aristotle when he quoted Ramus.5
The fact that in the same scene of Marlowe's play Faustus also makes Aristotle
appear to be the author of the Gorgian phrase on kai m on can serve as my pretext for
1966), pp. 221-22.
2 See Walter J. Ong, S.J., Ramus: Method and the Decay of Dialogue (1958; rpt. Cambridge, MA:
Harvard University Press, 1983).
3 Ong, pp. 160, 347-48 notes 41 and 42, and pp. 178, 350 n. 39.
4 Sophist 230b-c, 234e-235a, in Edith Hamilton and Huntington Cairns, eds., Plato: The Collected
Dialogues (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1980), pp. 973, 977-78.
5 See Marlowe's Doctor Faustus 1604-1616: Parallel Texts, ed. W. W. Greg (1950; rpt. Oxford:
Clarendon Press, 1968), p. 164 (1604 text, lines 36-38).

making a vaguely similar claim about the passage from the Phaedrus that James Murray
discusses.6 Plato seems here to be re-writing Gorgian rhetoric, and Socrates to be
practising it; the Gorgian echoes in this passage may be strong enough to complicate our
acceptance of the way in which Plato is deploying the terms antilogik and apat.
Gorgias regarded persuasion as a quasi-magical art which works on people by
molding a false argument (de pseud logon plasantes). It rests upon deceptions or
misleadings of opinion (doxis apatmata), but is apparently morally neutral, both because
Gorgias contrasts it to another magical art that rests upon errors or sins of soul (psuches
hamartmata), and because doxai are all that are available to us.7 Gorgias said of tragedy,
which he presumably regarded as a species of persuasive discourse, that it produces a
deception (apat) in which the deceiver is more justly esteemed than the nondeceiver and
the deceived is wiser than the undeceived.8 I am not sure that this is radically different
from the meaning of apat that Murray finds in Plato's argument, or from what we may
conclude about the deployment of apatmata in the splendid rhetoric of Socrates's second
oration.
Speech is a powerful lord, says Gorgias (logos dunastis megas estin).9 The case
of Helen shows persuasion to amount to the same thing as force: 'misleadings' of opinion
are a matter less of seduction than of abduction. This assimilation of peitho to bia is
clearly an example of the kind of misleading that Socrates is talking about at 261d and
onwards. But what are the results of Socrates's own oration (how much of which is
epistme and how much doxa I leave you to judge)? Will young Phaedrus return to his
friend Lysias, or have his affections been transferred? Has Socrates effectively abducted
him?
Gorgias seems to be present here in other ways as well. Socrates is mockingly
self-aware, in his first oration, of the degree to which his style is already not far from
dithyrambic (238d); Diodorus Siculus quotes these very words in describing the
6 Ibid., 1604 text, lines 38-42: Is, to dispute well, Logickes chiefest end? / Affoords this Art no greater
myracle: / Then reade no more, thou hast attaind the end: / A greater subiect fitteth Faustus wit, / Bid
Oncaymeon farewell.... See Sextus Empiricus, Adversus mathematicos, VII. 66, for the Gorgian
expression; the text is reprinted in Hermann Diels, ed., Die Fragmente der Vorsokratiker (4th ed.; 3
vols.; Berlin, 1922), vol. 2, p. 243 (Gorgias, fr. 3).
7 I am paraphrasing and quoting from the Encomium of Helen (Diels, fr. 11. 8-11, vol. 2, pp. 251-52). Our
confinement to the realm of opinion is implicit throughout this text and argued in Gorgias's On the
nonexistent or on Nature (fr. 3).
8 Diels, fr. 23; the translation is that of George Kennedy in R. K. Sprague, ed., The Older Sophists
(Columbia, SC: University of South Carolina Press, 1972), p. 65.
9 Diels, fr. 11. 8, p. 251; Sprague, ed., The Older Sophists, p. 52.

declamatory style of Gorgias.10 But I am thinking more particularly of Socrates's

response, at 261b-c, to Phaedrus's profession of ignorance as to the more general
applications of rhetoric: 'What? Are you acquainted only with the 'Arts' or manuals of
oratory by Nestor and Odysseus, which they composed in their leisure hours at Troy?
Have you never heard of the work of Palamedes?' PHAEDRUS: 'No, upon my word, nor
of Nestor either, unless you are casting Gorgias for the role of Nestor, with Odysseus
played by Thrasymachus, or maybe Theodorus.'11
If Guthrie is right in suggesting that sophistic technai, or manuals of rhetorical
instruction, may have consisted largely of models to be learned by heart, 12 then
Socrates's joke appears to refer to a practice of using the speeches of Homer's heroes as
though they were technai like Gorgias's Encomium of Helen or Apology of Palamedes
to the latter of which Socrates is clearly referring. The allusion is a resonant one, since as
Guido Calogero has shown, Plato's Apology of Socrates both echoes the wording of
Gorgias's Apology of Palamedes and rests upon the same ethical principle of nemo sua
sponte peccat; moreover, Socrates names Palamedes as the first of the unjustly
condemned heroes whom he hopes to meet in Hades (Apology 41b).13 In this context,
Phaedrus's association of Gorgias, the author of Palamedes' defence, with Nestor, and of
Thrasymachus with Odysseus, the accuser of Palamedes, may have some significance.
Is there, then, a certain doubleness to this dialogue? Do its argumentative and its
mythic structures mesh with one another, or pull in different directions? And while
moving beyond Gorgias in certain respects, does it yet remain profoundly Gorgian in
others?
But perhaps my own barefooted splashings in the Ilissus have deafened me to the
voices of Plato's interlocutors. Having, then, sufficiently muddied the waters, let me
conclude by thanking James Murray for his most stimulating paper, and by lapsing into
the role of Lysias, the last words of whose speech I now repeat: I think I have said all
that is needed; if you think I have neglected anything, and want more, let me know
(234c).
10 Diels, Leben und Lehre, 4, p. 237; Sprague, p. 33.
11 The translation is that of R. Hackforth, in Hamilton and Cairns, eds., Plato: The Collected Dialogues, p.
506.
12 W. K. C. Guthrie, The Sophists (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1977), p. 270. Guthrie is here
speaking of the technai of Gorgias.
13 Guido Calogero, Gorgias and the Socratic Principle nemo sua sponte peccat, in Carl Joachim Classen,
ed., Sophistik (Darmstadt, 1976), pp. 408-21, esp. 413-16.