MenoPlato

The Meno begins with a deceptively simple question: can virtue be taught? Socrates and Meno cannot answer it, because they cannot say what virtue is. Every proposed definition fails. Meno, frustrated, poses a paradox: how can you search for something when you do not know what it is? If you already know it, there is nothing to search for; if you do not, you will not recognize it when you find it.

Socrates responds with the theory of recollection. The soul, having existed before birth, already possesses knowledge of all things. Learning is not the acquisition of something new but the recovery of what the soul once knew and has forgotten. To demonstrate, Socrates leads an uneducated slave boy through a series of questions about geometry. The boy, who has never been taught mathematics, arrives at a correct proof about doubling the area of a square. He was not given the answer; the questions drew out what was already latent in him.

The recollection doctrine does not settle the original question, and the dialogue ends in uncertainty about whether virtue is knowledge, right opinion, or divine gift. But the Meno establishes problems that dominate the rest of Plato's work: the relationship between knowledge and opinion, the nature of definition, the possibility that all inquiry is a form of remembering. It is the hinge between the early Socratic dialogues, which end in perplexity, and the middle dialogues, which propose the theory of Forms as the answer.