Meno

The Meno is a dialogue by Plato, written in Greek and belonging to the Socratic corpus. Its absolute date is uncertain, but it is usually placed around 385 BC, at an intermediate stage between the author's early and mature works. Scholars have based this on the presence of Pythagorean themes, such as the immortality of the soul and reincarnation, and have debated whether it was written after Plato's first journey to southern Italy. The dialogue itself is set earlier, around 402 BC, in Athens.

The starting point is a question posed by Meno, a young aristocrat from Thessaly and a pupil of the sophist Gorgias: can virtue be taught, acquired through practice, or does it come by nature? Socrates replies that one must first know what virtue is. Meno offers definitions suited to different social groups, but Socrates shows that none captures what is common to all virtues, and that Meno himself ends in confusion, or aporia. From this arises the famous paradox of inquiry: one cannot search for what one does not know, since one would not recognise it upon finding it.

To answer it, Socrates presents the theory of recollection (anamnesis): the soul is immortal and has known everything before entering a body, so learning is a form of remembering. As a demonstration, he questions one of Meno's slaves, who has no training in geometry, and guides him through questions to discover how to double the area of a square. This episode is one of the most influential passages in Western philosophy on the question of innate knowledge.

The second part returns to whether virtue can be taught, now by means of the method of hypothesis. If virtue is knowledge, it should be teachable, yet Socrates cannot find recognised teachers. The exchange with Anytus, an Athenian politician who would later be one of Socrates' accusers, reveals the tension with tradition. Near the end, Meno raises the so-called Meno problem: why knowledge is valued more highly than true belief. Socrates answers with a famous and somewhat enigmatic distinction that anticipates later discussions of knowledge in works such as the Theaetetus.

The dialogue has had a lasting influence on epistemology and the philosophy of education, and its paradox and theory of recollection have been debated for centuries.