ABSTRACT
From a variety of perspectives, logos has been damned as the culprit and made accountable for the barrenness that plagues the twentieth century. The dialogues, populated as they are by representatives of both rhetoric and poetry—two options that the philosopher cannot dismiss as demonstrably false—thereby reflect the boundaries against which logos must collide and the conflicts by means of which it must be understood. Pyrrhonian skepticism seems to be flawed in its empirical observations about human psychology; in other words, it gets the appearances wrong. The goal for the Pyrrhonian is tranquillity (ataraxia). Characters such as Protagoras, Ion, Callicles, Thrasymachus, and Cleitophon represent positions that are essential to a complete understanding of the dialogues. Plato writes dialogues in which his Socrates can, for example, be awakened by Hippocrates, spurned by Cleitophon, or mocked by Callicles. A life without logos does not seem worth living for a human being.
