Why The Gorgias?

The Manchester Plato Reading Group is reading Thomas Taylor’s translation of Plato’s Gorgias in Autumn 2026. You can buy a copy of this translation here or learn why we read Thomas Taylor’s translations on our dedicated page.

The first session is on Tuesday the 29^th September, from 06:30pm to 08:00pm, on the top floor of The Briton’s Protection pub. They are fortnightly on Tuesdays thereafter, at the same time and the same place. Anyone with an interest in philosophy, dialectic, and lively discussion is welcome to join.

We are reading The Gorgias after The First Alcibiades and The Republic. Like both of those dialogues, The Gorgias is a dialogue which Platonic commentators consider to be about the political virtues. The political virtues are those concerned with the process of living well alongside others in society by establishing ‘right rulership’ of the intellectual faculty over the lower faculties of the soul. Lower faculties include our sense of pride and aggression, as well as our appetites. The process of establishing rule of the intellectual faculty involves cultivating reason; that is, engaging in dialectical argumentation in order to come to an understanding about the real nature of things, allowing you to distinguish between truth and falsehood, reality, and illusion. This, according to Plato, is how a human lives justly.

The Gorgias is the second dialogue that students of Plato should read according to the ancient syllabus of Neoplatonic philosopher Iamblichus, which the Manchester Plato Reading Group intends to adhere to. The Iamblichean syllabus was structured to provide an ascent through virtue, the student becoming a more competent philosopher as they ‘climb the ladder’ from habitual virtue to political, cathartic, contemplative, paradigmatic, and hieratic.