Das Menschenbild des Kallikles im platonischen Gorgias

The sophist Callicles in Plato’s Gorgias is one of the few interlocutors of the Platonic Socrates who persistently refuses to be refuted by Socrates’ arguments. In the contrary, he develops an alternative conception of man which he believes can show Socrates’ ideas about the good and man’s happiness wrong and illusory. This contribution analyses Callicles’ anthropology in the Gorgias and argues that Callicles’ position indicates a systematic problem in Socrates’ conception of happiness. Therefore, its function within the Gorgias is to introduce in to the conception of the Politeia where Plato abandons his earlier individualistic (and Socratic) concept of happiness and replaces it by the idea of the philosopher’s state.