Meno

The Meno is Plato's central middle-period dialogue on knowledge and learning. The visiting Thessalian aristocrat Meno opens the dialogue with a simple question — can virtue be taught? — that Socrates, by his usual route of definition-by-definition, shows neither of them can answer until they first say what virtue is.

The dialogue then turns on the paradox of inquiry: if you do not already know what virtue is, how will you recognise it when you find it? Socrates' answer — that all learning is in fact recollection of what the immortal soul already knows — is illustrated by the famous demonstration in which an untutored slave-boy is led, by question alone, to produce the geometric proof of how to double a square. The doctrine of recollection (anamnesis) has shaped epistemology and education theory for twenty-four centuries.