Socrates Rhetorical Analysis

1. Doesn’t the same hold for all the other things? Don’t you call shapes and colours admirable on the account of either some pleasure or benefit or both?
2. Doesn’t this also hold for sounds and all things musical?
3. And certainly things that pertain to laws and practices – the admirable ones, that is- don’t fall outside the limits of being either pleasant or beneficial.
4. Doesn’t the same hold for the admirability of the fields of learning, too?
Conclusion. Whenever one of two admirable things is more admirable than the other, it is so because it surpasses the other either in one of these, pleasure or benefit, or in both. Whenever one of two shameful things is more shameful than the other, it will be so because it surpasses the other either in pain
Therefore, for Socrates, no one would choose to do injustice since no one would choose what is more painful and bad. However, according to Vlastos, there is no suggestion here that the conclusion represents one of Polus’ standing convictions. Since the conclusion does not follow from anything Polus had said so far in this discussion, Socrates ‘mounts the above epagoge to win Polus’ acceptance of conclusion on the spot’. For Vlastos, Polus can reject premise 4 when Socrates tries to apply pleasure and benefit to laws and practices; and if Polus has sensed the shift to these more abstract objects, no less than that of bodies, colours, shapes, and sounds, the pleasure to the actual or ideal beholder is what accounts for admirability, he would have stymied Socrates. And it is true that it would be flawed to compare the more abstract things like laws and practices to bodies, colours, shapes and sounds. Therefore, Socrates refutation is not sound, as one of the premises can be