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On the Skeptical Influence of Gorgias's On Non-Being

How INFLUENTIAL WAS Gorgias's skeptical treadse On Non-Being (ONB) in the late fifth and early fourth centuries? Philosophers have paid considerable attention to the content of the treatise, but historians of philosophy have neglected the important question of its influence in its own and immediately subsequent generations. This neglect is particularly obvious in Professor Guthrie's ' otherwise judicious and thorough treatment of Gorgias. In addition to his detailed analysis of the content of the ONB (3. I92-2oo), he offers a paragraph on the philosophy of Gorgias (3.273) in which he relates the skepticism of the ONB to what we know from other sources of Gorgias's elevation of persuasion and doxa and points out that Plato's views on this matter were antithetical to Gorgias's. "Nothing/s as Parmenides used the verb, that is, exists as at the same time an immutable reality and the object of human knowledge. If there were we could not grasp it, and even if we could, we could not communicate our knowledge to others . . . . Only knowledge based on unshakeable proof could withstand the attacks of peitho and there is no such thing. This was, in Plato's eyes, the arch heresy which he must do his utmost to destroy. He must show, first, that there is such a thing as true and false opinion. Next, because if they are only opinions the true one will be as vulnerable as the false to the wiles of the persuader, he must restore the criterion of judgment and demonstrate how opinion can be converted to knowledge by 'thinking out the reason' (Meno 98a)." In this tantalizing paragraph Guthrie suggests (but carefully avoids asserting) two possibilities which are inherently of great interest to historians of philosophy and of great potential interest to exegetes of Plato: (a) that Plato himself knew the skeptical argumentation of the ONB; and (b) that Plato's attempts to secure the possibility of knowledge entailed a deliberate refutation not only of Gorgias's elevation of peitho and