Philosophy Essay

He calls over a slave boy, who has had no education or experience with mathematics, and asks him to solve a mathematical problem. He draws geometric figures in the ground and asks the slave to work out how long the sides of a square, of twice the area, would be. Initially, he gets the answer wrong but, through guidance from Socrates, eventually he reaches the correct answer. Socrates never actually explains anything to the boy, but instead helps him to think for himself. Socrates argues that, as the slave reaches this conclusion by himself, he is recollecting knowledge he already possessed. (Meno 84-85).

Towards the end of Meno, Socrates states that knowledge differs from true opinion in its ability to last over long periods of time. Socrates acknowledges that in many ways, knowledge and true opinion are equal; since both are certainly true, they lead to correct action without distinction. For example, in the passage Socrates compares a man who knows the way to Larisa to one who has a right opinion about the directions but has never actually been there, concluding that both would be equally competent guides. However, knowledge is, he argues, “fastened by the tie of the cause,” meaning one who has knowledge of a certain statement has grounded that truth in explanations and reasoning. Earlier in Meno, Socrates

Socrates begins to dissolve the paradox by stating that the soul is in fact immortal. Our souls go through a process of anamnesis which is simply just recollecting previous information. To prove that our souls have past experiences from multiple lives, he presents Meno with a scenario involving a slave boy and a simple geometric inquiry. In short, Socrates tries to prove that even a slave boy who appears to have no knowledge, can work out a simple geometric problem. The slave boy at first gives a few wrong answers and Socrates had to ask follow up questions to bring the slave boy to the right answer, however in no way did Socrates give the slave boy the answer – from his recollection of past experiences, the slave boy managed to correct himself and come to the right answer on his own. Therefore, we have pre-existing information in our souls and it is only a matter of remembering past information.

Meno, written by Plato, is a dialogue between two men, Socrates and Meno, which discusses the nature of virtue. At the end of the dialogue, Socrates suggests that a man’s virtuous actions can be derived from either knowledge or true opinion. Meno then wonders how knowledge and true opinion are different if both concepts can produce identical results. Socrates answers with an analogy, which provides a valid and sound argument about why he believes knowledge to be more valuable than true opinion.

-Socrates found that craftsmen were wise like the poets and knew many things that he himself did not know, but thought their mastery of their trade meant they were wise in other things when in fact they were not.

Socrates interaction with Meno started a chain reaction of arguments, claims, and theories. Socrates is known for exposing the ignorance of ethical claims and definitions. In Plato Socrates justifies his actions by stating how he is essentially providing society a service by teaching proper moral values. He believes that living a good life is knowing one’s limitation on their intelligence and seeking knowledge that could help them morally and intellectually. On this basis, Socrates enlists an argument with Meno of what is virtue in terms of the form and characteristics. Socrates, himself, confessed he did not know what virtue is, and in the hope of doing so, presses Meno on his interpretations of virtue. In Plato's, Meno Socrates deducts a claim that “no one desires bad things’’ and gives a valid argument that considers human values and human reasoning.

In order to do this, he goes about Athens questioning those he believes to be wiser than him, including politicians, poets, and craftsmen. Upon this questioning, he discovers that even those perceived as the wisest actually know far less than one would expect. Even the craftsmen, who have much practical wisdom in their respective fields, see their success as merely a tribute to their vast knowledge of many subjects. This, Socrates claims, is not true wisdom. Human wisdom can be described as the acknowledgement and acceptance that one does not know everything, nor is one capable of knowing everything. This, however, does not mean that people should sit idly by, never pursuing wisdom, for it is still vital to the attainment of a good life, which should be the ultimate goal of mankind.

“I am the wisest man alive, for I know one thing, and that is that I know nothing.” (Plato,19c).

Plato believed that our source of knowledge is an innate idea. Plato states that before we were born we lived in a perfect universe, and everything in that universe was perfect. In his play Meno, Plato illustrates this idea by telling the story of the slave boy. In the play, Socrates asks the boy to draw a square that is double in size. After trial and error, the boy is able to draw the square. There is a dialog between Socrates and Meno, where Socrates questions Meno on where the boy could have obtained that kind of knowledge. Socrates tells Meno that the boy has had no formal schooling, but still knows how to make the square bigger. Socrates concludes that it must be because the slave boy lives in a perfect universe before being born.

Plato’s dialogue the Meno explores the question of whether virtue can be taught. This dialogue provides no contextual setting like other early dialogues do, and instead it begins suddenly with Meno putting forth the question of whether virtue is teachable. Unlike earlier dialogues that mostly revolved around Socrates questioning and refuting an interlocutor who claimed to know something, though the Meno does this to an extent in the beginning, Socrates attempts to offer a potential positive solution to Meno’s paradox; in this dialogue Socrates also introduces a new method of inquiry that he calls hypothesis in an attempt to search for an answer to Meno’s initial question.

He interrogates a series of politicians, poets, and craftsmen. As one would expect, Socrates' investigation reveals that those who claim to have knowledge either do not really know any of the things they claim to know, or else know far less than they proclaim to know. The most knowledgeable of the bunch, the craftsmen, know about their craft, but they claim to know things far beyond the scope of their expertise. Socrates, so we are told, neither suffers the vice of claiming to know things he does not know, nor the vice of claiming to have wisdom when he does not have wisdom. This statement goes back to the idea of wisely ignorant human beings because it goes to show how being so wise like the craft men can really help but backfire being to wise which can be interrupted as being

thorough analysis it is safe to assume that Meno’s accusation lie not only in a belief that Socrates

Throughout the dialogue Meno the following question is brought up a number times: can one learn new things? Although the answer is never truly reached and may never be, I side with Socrates in stating that one does not truly ever learn new things, instead, using the Socratic idea of innatism, the idea that the mind is born with knowledge and is simply recalling former experiences when “learning” new things, I attempt to discuss why this may be possible.

In the Meno, Plato justifies the possibility for one’s mind to uncover knowledge. Knowing one can obtain knowledge motivates the mind to gain more knowledge. Plato explains the theory of recollection by first questioning what virtue is, then demonstrating the process through the questioning of a slave boy. Although a few weaknesses present themselves in Plato’s argument, Plato presents a valid theory on how our minds can obtain knowledge. This paper focuses on exploring Plato’s theory of recollection by examining the strengths and weaknesses of his discussion with Meno.

goal of Socrates through these dialogues is to make his point with the method of