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A Philosophy Of Education Analysis Of The Meno And Protagoras

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A Philosophy of Education Analysis of the Meno and Protagoras

The method of questioning that Socrates utilizes in the Meno is a type of poetic tale that is meant to reveal the idea of intelligence existing in the soul before birth. This type of story defines the importance of using allegory or using geometric figures to prove that a slave had a previous memory of geometry without being educated by a teacher. These types of questions seek to expose the fraud of sophistry by encouraging students to have faith in their “inner soul”, since it has memory of all that it has learned in previous lives. Therefore, Socrates attempts the trick the listen into understanding his point of view through a “mythos” or poetic tale. More so, the question of teaching virtue is also extended into the Protagoras dialogue, which defined a relativistic accounting of knowledge as not being absolute. These are important aspects of teaching methods that define how the Platonic dialogue defines inborn knowledge and the absolute nature of virtue in the soul. In the Meno, it is important to understand the concept of “knowledge” because the underlying argument for absolute truth is put forth by Socrates in the dialogue. Plato believed in the soul’s ability to know an absolute truth, which was carried within the soul before, during and after the life of the individual. However, the sophists believed that truth and knowledge was relativistic, which was different for every person. Attempting to

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