Abstract

BARREIRA, Marcelo. A duplicidade na educação da areté em A República e no Protágoras de Platão. Conjectura: filos. e Educ. [online]. 2017, vol.22, n.2, pp.320-341. ISSN 2178-4612.  https://doi.org/10.18226/21784612.v22.n2.06.

The article compares two proposals for the education of areté in Plato's texts: the "Myth of Prometheus" in Protagoras (320 C-328 B) and the "Cave Myth" in Book VII of The Republic. This is due to the ambiguity of the term areté, which can be understood as moral virtue or as competence. There is a structural homology between the myth narrated by Plato in Protagoras and Book VII above: its paradigmatic antithesis and theorical-evaluative. Both texts are structured in two parts: the narration of an allegory (mythos) and, soon after, the analytic explanation of this allegory by a rational discourse (logos). Following the contemporary terminology of Wolff, this debate translated into a divergent but complementary approach between the "legal truth" defended by Protagoras' character in a democratic context and the "technical competence" of the Socrates character in the second perspective. Debate that brings, until today, their pedagogical unfolding. As for nature and culture, hardened by the fixity of the laws of physics (physeis) and by the arbitrariness of legal laws (nomos), epistemology linked to the first type of knowledge overcame the humanities. This victory associated, after modernity, the sciences of nature with the true discourse on the real. However, the role of the sophists in emphasizing the relationship between truth and political-juridical construction in a democratic context has to be retaked. The central point of this view is the sophistical paradox of competently using something common, the word, which acquires a technical differential in the public arena thanks to the capacity for persuasion by a new technique of discourse: rhetoric.

Keywords : Plato; Areté; Democracy; Competence; Education.

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