I sofisti tra aletheia ed eikos: il caso di Gorgia

This paper aims to examine the notion of truth in the sophists, with particular focus on Gorgias. While the Treatise on Non-Being appears to posit an unbridgeable gap between speech and truth, the Defense of Palamedes, by confining truth to subjective experience, denies the possibility of communicating it to others through discourse. The Encomium of Helen, by contrast, begins by presenting truth as a quality that perfects speech. Yet at the heart of the argument, it is speech’s power to persuade beyond truth that comes to the fore. What, then, constitutes the truth of speech for Gorgias? The particular importance he gives to the notion of eikos suggests that truth should not be sought in an impossible correspondence between language and reality, but rather within discourse itself, in the rigor of its argumentative structure.