Led by Socratic Plato
About this course
The Set Texts paper of the Cambridge Philosophy Tripos asks first-year students to read a small number of foundational works closely and in the original argumentative grain rather than in summary. This first module takes Plato's Meno — and gives it the teacher it deserves.
It is led by the Socratic Plato: the Plato of the early dialogues, who records a man claiming to know nothing and means it. The Meno is the hinge of his work. It begins with the ordinary question of whether virtue can be taught, runs the familiar refutation until Plato's interlocutor is, in his own word, numb — and then does something the earlier dialogues never do. It offers a positive thesis: that the soul already contains what it seeks, and that learning is the recovery, by questioning, of knowledge it never truly lost. To make the case, Socrates calls over a slave boy who has never studied geometry and, asking only questions and supplying no answers, leads him to double the square. The demonstration is the heart of the module, and the student is put through it themselves.
The student leaves able to follow the whole movement of the dialogue — the search for a single definition of virtue and its collapse, the paradox of inquiry, the recollection thesis and its demonstration, the method of hypothesis, and the closing distinction between knowledge and stable true belief — reading the text directly and citing it by its Stephanus pages.
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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.