Abstract
There are five attitudes to truth: that of the philosopher, the truth-teller, the liar, the sophist, and the tyrant. After discussing the two most famous Greek Sophists, Gorgias and Protagoras, this essay argues that Trump’s attitude to truth while campaigning was that of a sophist: someone who is indifferent to the truth, using words only to acquire money, fame, and power. When he became president, however, his attitude changed to that of the tyrant described by Plato: someone who uses power to assert control over the “truth.” In other words, by the repeated statement of manifest falsehoods, he drew a circle around himself, forcing others to choose between submission to his will and recognition of an independent reality.
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Notes
- 1.
See Miller 2007.
- 2.
See Republic 474b–487a. All quotations of Plato are from Republic, unless otherwise stated. All quotations of Republic are from Reeve 2004.
- 3.
Frankfurt 2005.
- 4.
Murphy 2016.
- 5.
Mayer 2016.
- 6.
Encomium of Helen, in Reeve and Miller 2015: 36–38.
- 7.
Plato, Gorgias 447c. All quotations of Plato’s dialogs, apart from Republic, are from Cooper 1997.
- 8.
Protagoras fragment DK 80B1, in Reeve and Miller 2015: 35.
- 9.
Plato raises this problem about health and other apparent goods at Meno 87e6–88a1. Whether or not they are really good requires wisdom, which alone, therefore, is really good. See also Republic 6.491b–c.
- 10.
Coppins 2016.
- 11.
Gessen 2016a.
- 12.
Her superb account of this regime and its rise is now available in Gessen 2017.
- 13.
Gessen 2016b.
- 14.
Ioffe 2017.
- 15.
Sullivan 2016.
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———. The Future is History: How Totalitarianism Reclaimed Russia. Riverhead Books, 2017.
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Miller, P.L. (2018). Truth, Trump, Tyranny: Plato and the Sophists in an Era of ‘Alternative Facts’. In: Jaramillo Torres, A., Sable, M. (eds) Trump and Political Philosophy. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-74445-2_2
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