Looking at Plato's Meno
70 - 85
70-71d
- Most of Plato's work starts with an introductory passage. Often a long one, but not the Meno. Why?
Could the abrupt start be a theme that Meno is seeking quick easy answers as to what Virtue is? Socrates seems to want to pump the breaks. - He pumps the breaks because he wants to state that one cannot know how virtue may be acquired without knowing what it is (71b3–8).
- Meno's abruptness and Socrates' refusal to play along reveals two distinct views on learning.
- Meno thinks learning is just quick information transmission
- Socrates instead shows that it is a slow process that requires questions. Socrates calls it recollection but this could be thought of as reformulating existing knowledge within your own mind. This is strikingly similar to Popper's view on learning.
- If I do not know what something is, how could I know what qualities it possesses? 71b
- Possible metaphysical distinction - essential features of an object, what the object is itself VS non-essential features, what the object is like.
- Why does Socrates think that knowing the essential features is necessary for knowing the non-essential features?
- Can the essence explain the non-essential attributes??
- Appears to be anticipating Aristotle. (eg a Triangle essentially has 3 sides but that its sides equal 180 degrees is not an essence but follows necessarily)
- Is Plato making a mistake comparing an individual (Meno) with a property (virtue)? Or is this on purpose?
71e - 73c
- Meno lists many things he finds virtuous but Socrates is looking for something unitary. Something that is true to all bees must also be true of all virtues.
- After the analogies fail Socrates states 73a-c,
- Virtue consists of managing city well for man, household for woman
- A city or household cannot be managed well if not done moderately and justly
- So if men and women are to be good they both need justice and moderation
- Same with old men and children
- So all human beings to be good need justice and moderation
- all humans are good in the same way
- all humans are good by having the same virtue
73d-77b
- 73c-d "Power to rule over people"
- Does not apply to children or slaves
- power to rule with justice
- justice - a virtue or virtue?
- What is Meno's confusion?
- (a) what it is to seek the one form that many things have in common
- (b) he does not understand the difference between virtue itself and a virtue
- (c) he cannot grasp what the one virtue between virtue itself and a virtue is, (cannot find the definition of virtue)
- Meno has struggled on all of these points. At 72d2–3, he confessed to an (a)-type problem in saying that he did not understand the request to find the common characteristic underlying different virtues, as he could with the example of bees. then shows a (b)-type problem in the course of the discussion of the second definition when he fails to understand the question whether justice is virtue or a virtue (73e1–2).
- But when asked to find the common form of virtue, he professes himself unable (74a11–b1). Clearly he is stumbling over problem (c)
- Problem (c) Socrates finds reasonable.