In his dialogue Gorgias, Plato drafts a fictional conversation between Socrates and a group of pre-Socratic philosophers and teachers known as sophists, who were famed for their mastery of rhetoric. This experimental video essay from Epoché Magazine combines somewhat cryptic archival visuals, a haunting, dissonant score, and text from an exchange between Socrates and the titular Gorgias on the nature of oratory. In particular, Socrates’ interrogations address the powers and perils of rhetoric as a persuasive device, especially if used to convince mass audiences to adopt a ‘belief without knowledge’. Embedded in the exchange is both a clear expression Plato’s anti-democratic sentiment and a critique of the ‘art of oratory’ that still resonates some two millennia later.
Video by Epoché Magazine
Editor and composer: John C Brady
video
Food and drink
Local tensions simmer amid a potato salad contest at the Czech-Polish border
14 minutes
video
Knowledge
An Indigenous myth and a geological survey elicit two ways of knowing one place
4 minutes
video
War and peace
A war meteorologist’s riveting account of how the Allies averted a D-Day disaster
6 minutes
video
Neuroscience
Dog vision is a trendy topic, but what can we really know about how they see?
11 minutes
video
Information and communication
An animation built from road signs is a whirlwind study of flash communication
2 minutes
video
Biology
An elegy for a dying microbe explores what we really mean by ‘death’
9 minutes
video
Art
Creating art that was aware of itself – and the viewer – made Manet the first modernist
15 minutes
video
Biotechnology
It’s our responsibility to engineer corals that can weather the world we’ve created
11 minutes
video
War and peace
A century later, can poetry help us make sense of the First World War’s horrors?
9 minutes