• Issues in the Gorgias:
• Is it possible to teach good speaking or persuasion without teaching the content of good speech?
• Is it possible to teach someone to speak more persuasively about medical things than a doctor?
• If so, is it possible to teach that person to be more persuasive about medical things to an audience of doctors than a doctor?
• about carpentry to an audience of carpenters?
• Is persuasive speaking a matter of systematic knowledge or of a good "feel" for an audience and good "conning" instincts?
• Is philosophy useless beyond simply developing mental muscle for more important tasks?
• Is it right or wrong or neither to teach people to persuade who don't know what is right or wrong?
• Can the teacher of a skill be held responsible for its use?
• Can the teacher of an idea be held responsible for it?
• Is skill different from ideas in that respect?
• Is it better to harm or to be harmed?
• Is doing wrong and getting away with it the worst harm that can befall one's soul?
• If one wants harm to come to one's enemies, should one hope that they do evil and get away with it?
  
• Is it better to refute or to be refuted?
• Is the absolute ruler actually powerful? at doing what? What the ruler wants?
• What if the absolute ruler is the least likely to know what she *really* wants?
• poverty : financial condition :: disease : bodily condition :: justice : condition of one's soul
• Is wrongdoing only wrong by convention, or is it also wrong "by nature" or "really"?
• Is the point of life fulfilling one's appetites and desires, whatever they happen to be? and is the person who fulfills the largest appetites most fully the most successful?
• Can a person be mistaken about what they want? Even if they are firmly convinced that they want something, can they be mistaken?
  
• Is "true" politics a matter of telling people the truth or telling them what they want to hear?
• Socrates says of his trial: "I shall be judged like a doctor before a jury of children with a pastry cook as prosecutor"
• should that matter to Socrates?
• How can one benefit a criminal? Are there irredeemable criminals?