Casey Perin
· Professor of PhilosophyUniversity of California, Irvine · Classics
Active 2005–2025
About
Professor Casey Perin is a faculty member in the Department of Philosophy at the University of California, Irvine, within the School of Humanities. He earned his Ph.D. from the University of California, Berkeley, in 2001. His research interests include ancient philosophy, philosophy of action, moral psychology, and 17th & 18th century philosophy. Professor Perin has authored the book "The Demands of Reason: An Essay on Pyrrhonian Scepticism" published by Oxford University Press in 2010. His scholarly work also includes numerous journal articles and book chapters that explore topics such as Pyrrhonian scepticism, ancient epistemology, Aristotle's categories, and Descartes' legacy. His contributions to the field reflect a focus on understanding ancient philosophical traditions and their relevance to contemporary philosophical debates.
Research topics
- Computer Science
- Epistemology
- Philosophy
- Literature
- Cognitive science
- Art
- Psychology
Selected publications
2025-07-03
book-chapter1st authorCorrespondingAbstract In his conversation with Gorgias, Socrates begins by assuming that rhetoric is an expertise, but in this chapter the author argues that this assumption is purely strategic. Socrates aims to show that Gorgias himself attributes certain features to rhetoric that disqualify it from being an expertise. The questions Socrates asks Gorgias about rhetoric are generic just in the sense that they are questions that can be asked about any expertise—at least given Socrates’ own conception of an expertise as a structed body of knowledge individuated by its subject matter. According to Gorgias, however, the orator can speak persuasively about any topic provided his audience is sufficiently ignorant about that topic. On Gorgias’ view, therefore, the scope of the orator’s persuasion is limited not by subject matter but only by the knowledge his audience has. This can be so, the author claims, only if rhetoric as Gorgias conceives of it lacks a subject matter. And a practice without a subject matter is not an expertise. The author examines the significance of this conclusion and of the closely related distinction Socrates draws between an expertise and a knack (ἐμπειρία).
2025-07-03
book-chapter1st authorCorrespondingAbstract In this chapter, the author examines Socrates’ notorious refutation of Gorgias. The source of its notoriety is Socrates’ reliance on an apparently unmotivated and implausible principle about the relation of knowledge to action. That principle holds, very roughly, that what someone knows or believes determines what he does. Call this the Knowledge Principle. Socrates is often taken to be arguing to the Knowledge Principle via something like an induction by enumeration, and so reading his argument seems vulnerable to several well-rehearsed objections. The author concedes that this reading is possible, but insists it isn’t mandatory. One can read Socrates as instead arguing from the Knowledge Principle. Socrates gives Gorgias no reason to accept this principle because he recognizes that Gorgias already accepts it. The author considers why Gorgias might accept the Knowledge Principle and conclude that it underwrites Gorgias’ very strong claims about the power and value of rhetoric.
2025-07-03
other1st authorCorrespondingAbstract Talking and Knowing consists of a set of more or less independent but interconnected essays on Plato’s Gorgias. In the Introduction, the author describes what he takes to be the book’s distinctive contribution to the existing literature on Plato’s dialogue. He devotes two chapters to each of the three major episodes within the dialogue: Socrates’ successive conversations with first Gorgias, then Polus, and finally Callicles. He provides detailed summaries of each of the six chapters of the book. The author then outlines the distinctive approach to reading Plato he presents in the book’s postscript. He closes with a brief discussion of the importance of the distinction between talking and knowing in the Gorgias.
2025-07-03
other1st authorCorresponding2025-07-01
book1st authorCorrespondingAbstract This book consists of a set of independent but interconnected essays on the philosophical riches of Plato’s Gorgias. Two essays are devoted to each of the three major episodes within the dialogue: Socrates’ successive conversations with first Gorgias, then Polus, and finally Callicles. The book begins by examining Gorgias’ conception of rhetoric and Socrates’ criticism of it, including Socrates’ notorious refutation of Gorgias. It turns next to Socrates’ curious claim that orators, like tyrants, have no real power, and it offers a novel diagnosis of Socrates’ failure to refute Polus’ claims about the value of injustice and the disvalue of justice. The book then offers an extended analysis of Callicles’ distinction between natural and conventional norms of justice and shame and the difficulties this distinction creates for Callicles. In this context it compares Callicles’ genealogy of conventional norms with Nietzsche’s genealogy of Christian morality. Callicles also presents a comprehensive and compelling indictment of philosophy as the organizing activity of an adult life. The author argues that (perhaps predictably) its force has been underappreciated by philosophers. That indictment is closely aligned with Callicles’ distinctive conception of the superior human being. The book closes with an extended argument against reading Plato’s dialogues with the goal of discovering what he thinks. Instead, the author suggests, we should read Plato as engaged in the amorphous and heterogeneous activity of philosophical exploration—an activity whose interest, value, and success do not depend on it generating a philosophical view.
2025-07-03
book-chapter1st authorCorrespondingAbstract Socrates claims that the way of refutation Polus practices is of little value because it employs a tactic that is insensitive to truth. Yet in this respect the tactic Socrates employs in his preferred way of refutation appears to be no different. In this chapter I argue that we can determine whether this appearance is misleading, and so whether Socrates’ criticism of Polus indicts his own argumentative practices, only be looking closely at Socrates’ refutation of Polus. But interpretative and philosophical puzzles abound here. Socrates insists that Polus has beliefs about the relative value of doing versus suffering injustice that Polus denies having. There are ways to deflate Socrates’ claim about what Polus believes, but I urge that we should resist a deflationary reading at least until we have tried to make sense of Socrates as meaning just what he says. I then explain how the argumentative task Socrates sets himself in refuting Polus is complex, and more complex than it might initially seem. However, neither the complexity of that task nor the quality of the arguments Socrates employs in attempting to discharge it explains why Socrates fails to refute Polus. Instead, I argue that Socrates simply fails to anchor his arguments in anything Polus believes, in part because he misunderstands what Polus says. That is why those arguments exert no doxastic pressure on Polus and produce not change in his views.
Everybody Wants to Rule the World
2025-07-03 · 1 citations
book-chapter1st authorCorrespondingAbstract In this chapter the author considers first why Polus is unimpressed with Socrates’ refutation of Gorgias and the role shame plays in Polus’ diagnosis of that refutation. This shame is closely connected to the admiration Polus thinks that not only Gorgias but everyone has for the power that enables the orator and the tyrant to commit injustice with impunity. The author turns next to Socrates’ torturous argument that orators and tyrants have no power. This argument depends on a distinction between two attitudes that motivate action—wanting to do something and thinking it best to do it—together with the claim that neither the orator nor the tyrant does what they want. Socrates places an objective restriction on the attitude of wanting: its object is necessarily the real rather than the merely apparent good. He portrays orators and tyrants as near total practical failures, almost always failing to do what benefits them and, given the objective restriction on wanting, thereby failing to do what they want. Socrates owes us an explanation for the grotesque practical incompetence he attributes to orators and tyrants, and the author argues that at the required level of detail there are only two possible explanations and neither is satisfactory. Nonetheless, Socrates does make it clear that in his view the orator or tyrant’s practical failure is the result of an epistemic one: they fail to do what they want because they fail to know what they want. The author concludes the chapter with a puzzle left unresolved in the Gorgias about the attitude of wanting as Socrates conceives of it.
2025-07-03
book-chapter1st authorCorrespondingAbstract Callicles is an interlocutor who is a fierce and compelling critic of the life Socrates leads. According to Callicles, that life is shameful and scarcely worth living precisely because it is a philosophical rather than a political life. In this chapter the author begins by working through Callicles’ harsh denunciation of philosophy as the organizing activity of an adult life, and then the author considers just what Callicles finds valuable about a political life and why he might think of engagement in politics as a basic source of ethical knowledge. Next he turns to Callicles’ description of the superior human being, his rejection of the conventional conception of self-control, and his disastrous flirtation with a crude hedonism. The author argues that Callicles shares with Socrates a certain formal conception of virtue as the expert ability to satisfy just those desires that are beneficial and so worthy of satisfaction. The formal conception of virtue underwrites Callicles’ distinctive version of the pleonectic life, a version Socrates seems to willfully conflate with the philosophically uninteresting and indefensible life devoted to maximizing the indiscriminate satisfaction of a maximum number of completely undisciplined desires. The author closes by discussing why Socrates fails to convert Callicles to the philosophical life and, more precisely, why Callicles is unmoved by Socrates’ argument that a life in politics would require Callicles to become just what he despises.
2025-07-03
book-chapter1st authorCorrespondingAbstract In the Postscript the author explains why and in what sense he doubts we have good reason to care what Plato thinks. The source of his skepticism is the dissatisfaction he feels with a conception of philosophy as consisting, above all else, in having philosophical views. The author finds this dogmatic conception neither mandatory nor especially appealing and argues that it has unfortunate consequences for the way we read Plato’s dialogues. Even if Plato had philosophical views, as he surely did, it doesn’t follow that he wrote his dialogues to present those views to his readers as his own. Here the author suggests that the distinction between the writer of a text and its author is relevant and clarifying, and with that distinction in place he raises some worries about reading the dialogues with the goal of discovering what Plato thinks. He proposes, and the proposal is admittedly sketchy, that we see Plato the author as engaged in an activity he dubs philosophical exploration. The author tries to explain what he finds attractive about an exploratory reading of Plato, including especially the fact that it encourages us to engage in the very activity it takes the dialogues to exemplify by exploring the philosophical material with which a particular dialogue is occupied beyond the point required for mere exegesis.
Nature Against Something That Is Nature
2025-07-03
book-chapter1st authorCorrespondingAbstract Callicles appreciates more keenly than does Polus the full significance of Socrates’ claims about the value of justice and the disvalue of injustice. The truth of those claims would undercut the whole of the ethical life and give reason to live something close to its antithesis. In this chapter, the author begins by unpacking why Callicles thinks this is so. Next, he turns to the strange demand Socrates makes of Callicles: either refute the claims I’ve made about justice and injustice or you, Callicles, will not agree with yourself (482B2–6). The author argues that this demand asks Callicles to do the impossible, and that is precisely why Socrates makes it. Callicles responds by accusing Socrates of acting like an adolescent in conversation and playing the demagogue. The author unpacks these accusations and suggests they can’t be lightly dismissed. In the second half of this chapter, he examines Callicles’ genealogy of the conventional norms of justice and shame and his motives for offering it. At various points, comparison with Nietzsche’s genealogy of Christian morality proves useful. Callicles thinks he can reveal the value of conventional ethical norms by isolating their origins, and that revelation is supposed to enable Socrates to recognize that he is no less shameful than the norms he endorses. The author closes the chapter by arguing that Callicles’ genealogy undercuts one of its principal presuppositions, namely, that the norms it targets are conventional rather than natural.
Frequent coauthors
- 4 shared
Richard Bett
- 2 shared
Stéphane Marchand
- 1 shared
Mikyoung Lee
- 1 shared
Svavar Hrafn Svavarsson
University of Iceland
- 1 shared
Pierre Pellegrin
- 1 shared
R. J. Hankinson
The University of Texas at Austin
- 1 shared
James Allen
University of Alaska Fairbanks
- 1 shared
Carlos Lévy
Software (Spain)
Education
- 2001
Ph.D.
University of California, Berkeley
- Resume-aware match score
- Save to shortlist
- AI-drafted outreach
See your match with Casey Perin
PhdFit ranks faculty by your research interests, methods, and publications — grounded in their actual work, not templates.
- Free to start
- No credit card
- 30-second signup