I read many of the Platonic dialogues in college, and I read The Republic several times, but I’d never read Meno, known to be one of Plato’s most influential dialogues on the field of education. After several false starts over the last few years, I finally got around to reading the whole thing. It is, like all of Plato’s work, at once simple and commonsensical, and yet rich and complex.

The main idea is that Socrates and Meno are – in true Socratic fashion – attempting to understand what arete (often translated as “virtue” but in the version I read as “excellence”) really is. As usual, Socrates is ostensibly trying to learn about excellence from Meno, who claims that he knows much and has spoken to great crowds about it before, but through Socrates’s dialectic questioning, it quickly becomes apparent to the reader and to Meno that he has trouble defining excellence. Socrates contends that this is the best approach:
“And the more dialectical approach is probably not only to give truthful answers, but also to proceed via whatever the person being questioned admits that he knows. So I shall endeavour to talk with you in this way too.”
But when Socrates proposes that this inability to define excellence on both of their parts should motivate them to search together for the truth, Meno replies by asking a fascinating question about how he and Socrates will know when they arrive at the truth – the so-called-Meno’s Paradox:
Continue reading “Meno”