Meno
- Language:
- English
- Status:
- Complete work
- Authorship:
- Written by the author
- Condition of the text:
- No scanning noise detected (automatic measure over the whole text, not checked by hand)
- Extent:
- ~21,900 words · 104 passages
Cite this work
- APAPlato. (n.d.). Meno. Digital reproduction: SigPhi. https://sigphiai.com/en/works/plato/meno
- MLAPlato. Meno. Digital reproduction, SigPhi, https://sigphiai.com/en/works/plato/meno.
- ChicagoPlato. Meno. Digital reproduction, SigPhi. https://sigphiai.com/en/works/plato/meno.
Reference to the edition that SigPhi reproduces: SigPhi is its digital reproduction, not its publisher. The edition's year is not in the metadata (hence "n.d."), and the translator appears only when recorded.
What it is about
Can virtue be taught? The question opens onto a larger one: how can you look for something when you don't know what it is? Plato's answer is that learning is recollection, and he demonstrates it by walking an uneducated slave through a geometry proof.
Context and history
The birthplace of the theory of recollection and, in the slave scene, the first argument that knowledge is not all acquired from outside. Meno's paradox — you cannot search for what you do not know — remains live in epistemology and in machine learning.
Editorial context, not a citable source: unlike the passages of the work itself, these statements cannot be checked against the corpus.
the abstractions of mathematics or metaphysics; we pass imperceptibly from one to the other. Reason and fancy are mingled in the same passage. The ideas are sometimes described as many, coextensive with the universals of sense and also with the first principles of ethics; or again they are absorbed into the single idea of good, and subordinated to it. They are not more certain than facts, but they are equally certain (Phaedo). They are both personal and impersonal. They are abstract terms: they are also the causes of things; and they are even transformed into the demons or spirits by whose help God made the world. And the idea of good (Republic) may without violence be converted into the Supreme Being, who 'because He was good' created all things (Tim.). It would be a mistake to try and reconcile these differing modes of thought. They are not to be regarded seriously as having a distinct meaning. They are parables, prophecies, myths, symbols, revelations, aspirations after an unknown world. They derive their origin from a deep religious and contemplative feeling, and also from an observation of curious mental phenomena. They gather up the elements of the previous philosophies, which they put together in a new form. Their great diversity shows the tentative character of early endeavours to think. They have not yet settled down into a single system. Plato uses them, though he also criticises them; he acknowledges that both he and others are always talking about them, especially about the Idea of Good; and that they are not peculiar to himself (Phaedo; Republic; Soph.). But in his later writings he seems to have laid aside the old forms of them. As he proceeds he makes for himself new modes of expression more akin to the Aristotelian logic. Yet amid all these varieties and incongruities, there is a common meaning or spirit which pervades his writings, both those in which he treats of the ideas and those in which he is silent about them.…