Gorgias's Inexistence Of Truth

Gorgias, radical skeptic and rhetorician of fifth century B.C. Athens, stood in stark opposition to the idea of truth. With assertive declarations of the falsity of all declarations, Gorgias practiced persuasion over education, with an apparent aim for personal gain rather than truth or virtue like a philosopher. Gorgias firmly believed that nothing exists, and if anything could possibly exist, its existence was unknowable, and if anything was existent and knowable, such knowledge was incommunicable. (Sproul 28) These assertions are false, his argument invalid. Firstly, as proven by multiple philosophers and through simple logic, truth exists. As demonstrated by Gorgias’ self-contradictory remarks, truth cannot logically be disproven, as logical

Truth must logically exist, and Socrates knew this. His method of bringing others to discover this truth, choosing education over manipulation, was through questions, building logical arguments from the answers he was given until truth was found. As demonstrated in Plato’s dialogues, this method was effective. (Sproul 31) Other future philosophers, namely Aristotle and Thomas Aquinas, argued for the necessity of truth in a different way. Aristotle argued for the necessity of an “unmoved mover” (Sproul 48); Aquinas took it upon himself to prove the necessity of God (Sproul 70-71). Using only logic and proven factual observances of the laws of nature, both proved the necessity of the existence of something, and thus, the existence of truth. In addition to proving truth, these philosophers (and I, in this essay) have understood truth and communicated it to readers, thus proving all three aspects of Gorgias’ argument

According to him, “Homo mensura.”, or “Man is the measure of all things.”. (Sproul 29) By this logic, a perception cannot be considered universally true or false, only true or false to one individual. These statements are false, as obviously apparent when considering universal truths. Firstly, each individual universal truth is proven by logic, as well as by repetition of experimentation through history. By definition, a universal truth must be truthful consistently throughout all time, space, etc., so to be considered a universal truth, it cannot logically be considered untrue under any circumstances in any point in history. Examples of universal truths are mathematical equations. The answer or answers of an equation do not have any association with an individual’s opinion, nor have they ever in the course of history. They do, however, have a direct association with logic. If something is always logically true, and one considers it to be false, such consideration is blatantly false. Secondly, universal truths cannot be disproven as a whole. Similar to how truth as a whole cannot be disproven, a valid logical argument must use universal truths to reach its conclusion. In addition, claiming that truth is different for everyone is a universal statement, and if statements cannot be universally true, that statement is clearly