Abstract
Plato’s Gorgias suggests that practitioners of rhetoric assume a pleonectic conception of human nature, according to which human beings by nature seek to maximize what is advantageous to them and are limited in this pursuit by justice and law. By contrast, Socrates treats human nature as a part of orderly cosmic nature. Plato’s Phaedrus argues that rhetoric’s persuasive ends are better served by replacing its conception of human nature, based on what seems to be likely (eikos), with a true conception of the different types of human characters. Plato’s Republic develops an account of human nature as complex, having rational as well as nonrational motivational and cognitive capacities, to show how it is perfected by justice and law (rather than being hampered by them as on the pleonectic conception). This is because our rational nature seeks to know the truth, which is limited and orderly, and to produce good and beautiful things in accordance with this knowledge.
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