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Résumé
In the “Charmides” Plato ascribes to Socrates the recourse to a curious metaphor. To young Charmides, who is in need of a headache therapy, he explains that this ought to be preceded by a cure for his soul. “The treatment of the soul –Socrates puts it – is by means of certain charms, and these charms are kaloi logoi”. The study of this image of the charm allows the author of this book to discuss a key concept in Plato’s oeuvre: persuasion, as the subtitle reads. The main outcome of this enquiry is the sketching of an original reworking of the relationship between philosophy and rhetoric, which is often flattened to a mere opposition. Socrates is not a rhetorician, nor is Gorgias a philosopher, but both of them claim to be aiming at persuading the others. And philosophical persuasion, though in a certain sense is something completely different from the rhetorical one, in another shows itself as the offspring of a compulsory compromise of the philosopher with the rhetorician’s activity.