Gorgias of Leontini and Ancient Greek model of descriptive epistemology

In the article we tried to overcome the stereotypes that are associated with the understanding of the Sophistic, firstly, as rhetorical or pedagogical practice mainly, deprived of philosophical content, and, secondly, - insisting on the philosophical component of the sophistic movement, we intend to show that it is not a philosophy of relativism or nihilism, as it was supposed by history of philosophy in XIX-XX century. The Sophistic is a fully valid part of philosophy, but it has significant differences with Academics and Peripatetics, who, based on the essentialist program and related with it understanding of truth, interpreted the Sophistics by principles of their own fundamentalist paradigm. We interpret the sophistic philosophy applying to it the concept of descriptive epistemology, and we intend to apply it to the sophistic principle of philosophical inquiry in Antiquity. Our interpretation of Gorgias doctrine is based on this premise. As ontology the Gorgias' doctrine appears as criticism of the Eleatics and Pluralists (Empedocles), demonstrating the fallacy of their doctrines of what-is and what-is-not, as epistemology its shows criticism of the theory of knowledge, demonstrating the failure of previous concepts of the known object and the knowing subject. These features of Gorgias' philosophy allow us to speak of him as the creator of a new paradigm of descriptive epistemology and forerunner Pyrrhonism. A main feature of the philosophy of Gorgias is its new and original doctrine of language as a tool of knowledge and framing the world.

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