PHIL 150 · Set Texts — Plato's Meno

Led by Socratic Plato

The first set text of the Cambridge Part IA Philosophy syllabus, read with Socrates himself. Plato's Meno opens with a simple question — can virtue be taught? — and arrives at the strangest idea in early Greek philosophy: that learning is recollection. The student sits in Meno's chair, is refuted as Meno is refuted, watches an unschooled boy recover a geometrical truth by questioning alone, and leaves holding the distinction between knowledge and true belief that the rest of philosophy is built on.

1. Module 1 ○ Open

   Plato's Meno: Recollection and the Teachability of Virtue

   Led by Socratic Plato

   The question

   Can virtue be taught — and, before we can answer that, can we inquire at all into something we do not yet understand? Plato's *Meno* presses both questions at once. Socrates refuses to say whether virtue is teachable until he knows what virtue *is*, and refuses to pretend he knows; when his interlocutor objects that one cannot search for what one does not know, Socrates answers not with an argument but with a demonstration — an unschooled boy recovering a geometrical truth through questioning alone — and proposes that all learning is recollection. The module reads the dialogue as the single sustained movement it is, from the failure of definition, through the paradox of inquiry and its famous answer, to the distinction between knowledge and true belief on which so much later philosophy rests.

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