Book: Meno

Overview
Plato’s Meno stages a searching conversation between Socrates and Meno, a young Thessalian aristocrat and pupil of the sophist Gorgias. The dialogue begins with a deceptively simple question: can virtue be taught? Socrates refuses to answer until they first discover what virtue is. This demand for definition drives a series of examinations that expose confusions about virtue’s nature, spur a famous epistemological paradox, and culminate in the theory of recollection. The work closes in characteristic aporia: the characters fail to secure a definition, yet gain clarified questions and a nuanced view of how right action relates to knowledge.

Defining Virtue
Meno offers a sequence of proposals. First he lists virtues by roles: a man’s virtue is to manage the city well and benefit friends while harming enemies, a woman’s to manage the household, and so on. Socrates objects that listing instances is not grasping the common form. Pressed for a single account, Meno suggests that virtue is the power to rule over people; Socrates notes this cannot cover children and slaves and, when conditioned by justice, smuggles in a part of virtue. Meno then offers desiring good things and acquiring them, but Socrates argues no one desires what he believes bad, and acquisition without justice is not virtue. Each attempt either proves too narrow or presupposes another virtue, especially justice, revealing circularity.

Meno’s Paradox and Recollection
Frustrated, Meno likens Socrates to a numbing torpedo fish and poses the paradox of inquiry: if one knows, inquiry is needless; if one does not, inquiry is impossible, since one would not recognize the answer. Socrates counters with recollection: the soul is immortal and has learned all; learning is remembering. He illustrates this by questioning an uneducated slave-boy through a geometry problem about doubling a square. The boy first errs, then, without being told the answer, is led to discover that the square on the diagonal doubles the area. The episode suggests that correct understanding can be elicited by guided questioning, and that inquiry is coherent even without prior explicit knowledge.

Is Virtue Teachable?
Returning to the initial question, Socrates argues that virtue, being good, must be beneficial; qualities like courage or temperance are only beneficial when directed by wisdom. This points toward virtue being a kind of knowledge, and therefore teachable. But if it had teachers, one would expect to find them. Anytus, a prominent Athenian statesman, enters and angrily rejects sophists as corrupt, insisting that any respectable Athenian gentleman could teach virtue; yet he cannot identify actual teachers, and famous statesmen seemingly failed to educate their own sons in virtue. The absence of reliable teachers undermines the claim that virtue is knowledge.

Right Opinion and the Daedalus Analogy
Socrates distinguishes knowledge from true opinion. Right opinions can guide action just as well as knowledge, like a person who leads to Larissa with correct belief though lacking an explanatory account. Yet such opinions are unstable unless tied down by reasoning; otherwise, like the animated statues of Daedalus, they run away. When tethered by an account, true opinion becomes knowledge. If there are no teachers to supply that tether, virtuous action likely stems from true opinion bestowed by divine dispensation rather than teachable expertise.

Ending and Significance
The dialogue ends without a definition of virtue or a definitive stance on its teachability. Socrates proposes a provisional view: virtue is beneficial only with wisdom, and when it appears without teachability it arises from right opinion granted by the gods. Meno departs with a charge to report to Anytus, whose hostility foreshadows Socrates’ later trial. The conversation leaves readers with a method rather than a doctrine: demand the common form, test claims through reasoned refutation, and recognize that progress in inquiry may consist in refining the question as much as in securing an answer.