PLATO — MENO
Platonism · Greek · Ancient
Core Argument
The Meno asks whether virtue can be taught, and in answering introduces two of Plato's most important philosophical claims. First, that all genuine learning is recollection: the soul possesses knowledge from before birth, and inquiry recovers rather than acquires it, demonstrated through Socrates' geometry lesson with an uneducated slave boy. Second, that virtue is a form of knowledge rather than habit or convention, though Socrates concedes that virtuous men appear to succeed through right opinion rather than genuine knowledge, leaving the relationship between knowledge and virtue deliberately unresolved.
Context
Written in the middle period of Plato's career, the Meno engages directly with the sophistic claim, associated particularly with Gorgias, that virtue is a teachable skill like rhetoric. The framing question, whether virtue can be taught, was a live political issue in democratic Athens, where the sons of great men frequently failed to inherit their fathers' qualities. The slave-boy demonstration is the first explicit statement of the doctrine of recollection, which is developed more fully in the Phaedo and The Republic.
Lineage
Reader's Note
The Grube translation (Hackett) is standard. Read the Meno before The Republic if the theory of recollection is unfamiliar; it states the doctrine more simply. Klein's "A Commentary on Plato's Meno" (Chicago, 1965) is the standard close reading.
Author
The Meno occupies a transitional position in the Platonic corpus — placed by most scholars between the early Socratic dialogues (Apology, Euthyphro, Crito) and the fully developed middle-period works (Phaedo, Republic, Phaedrus). Plato (c. 428–348 BCE) uses it to introduce, for the first time, two doctrines that will be central to all the middle dialogues: the theory of recollection (anamnesis) and the first sketch of the theory of Forms. The historical Meno was a Thessalian nobleman who participated in Cyrus's expedition against Artaxerxes in 401 BCE (described by Xenophon in the Anabasis) and died shortly after — Plato's portrait of him as intellectually overconfident and ethically slippery is thought to reflect Meno's actual reputation. The other major interlocutor, Anytus, was one of Socrates' actual accusers at the trial of 399 BCE, and his appearance in the Meno as a defender of conventional education and an enemy of the Sophists gives the dialogue its political sharpness.
Historical Impact
The Meno's doctrine of recollection — demonstrated through Socrates' questioning of an uneducated slave boy who arrives at geometric truths through guided inquiry alone — established the philosophical tradition of nativism in epistemology: the view that the mind brings innate knowledge to experience rather than acquiring all knowledge from it. Leibniz explicitly endorsed a version of Platonic recollection against Locke's tabula rasa in the New Essays on Human Understanding, arguing that the mind contains innate principles that experience occasions rather than creates. Chomsky's twentieth-century nativism about linguistic structure — the argument that children acquire grammatical competence too rapidly and from too impoverished an input to have learned it inductively — has been explicitly connected to the Meno's demonstration. The dialogue's distinction between knowledge and true belief at 96d–98b — anticipating by 2,400 years the contemporary epistemological debate about what distinguishes knowledge from lucky true belief — was retroactively recognized as foundational after Edmund Gettier's 1963 paper showed that justified true belief is not sufficient for knowledge.
Reception History
Ancient Neoplatonists — Proclus chief among them — focused on the recollection doctrine as the dialogue's central contribution, developing it into a full account of the soul's pre-existent knowledge of the Forms. The slave boy demonstration was read as evidence for the soul's immortality: what else could explain knowledge that was not acquired in this life? The distinction between knowledge and true belief received comparatively little attention until analytic philosophy, after Gettier, retroactively made Meno 98a one of the founding texts of epistemology. The twentieth century produced two divergent scholarly approaches: one treats the Meno as primarily a dialogue about knowledge and its conditions, reading the recollection doctrine as an epistemological theory; the other treats it as primarily a dialogue about virtue and its teachability, reading the recollection doctrine as instrumental — a way of showing that virtue is not ordinary acquired knowledge, since it cannot be taught in the way geometry can be taught. Contemporary scholarship has focused on the unity of the dialogue's three main movements: the aporia about virtue's definition, the recollection argument, and the conclusion that virtue is a divine gift — asking how these fit together into a coherent philosophical whole.
Key Passages
But how will you enquire, Socrates, into that which you do not know? What will you put forth as the subject of enquiry? And if you find what you want, how will you ever know that this is the thing which you did not know?
Meno, 80d. Trans. Jowett (1888).
Meno's paradox of inquiry: you cannot search for what you do not know, because you would not recognize it if you found it; and you cannot search for what you do know, because you already have it. The paradox is a genuine logical problem, not mere sophistry, and Socrates takes it seriously: his response — the doctrine of recollection — is that all inquiry is in fact recovery of knowledge already possessed but forgotten. The paradox is the engine of the entire dialogue.
Then he who does not know may still have true notions of that which he does not know? ... And at present these notions have just been stirred up in him, as in a dream; but if he were frequently asked the same questions, in different forms, he would know as well as any one at last.
Meno, 85c. Trans. Jowett (1888).
The conclusion of the slave boy demonstration. Socrates has led an uneducated slave to correct answers about the relationship between the diagonal of a square and its area — without telling him anything, only by questioning. The argument is that this knowledge must have been in the boy prior to the questioning, since nothing was put in from outside. The educational implication is that genuine teaching is not instruction but elicitation — which is why the Socratic method takes the form it does.
He who has knowledge will always act rightly and well; he who has true opinion will sometimes act rightly and sometimes not. ... Then true opinion is as good a guide as knowledge for the purpose of acting rightly?
Meno, 97b–c. Trans. Jowett (1888).
The distinction between knowledge and true belief, introduced to explain why virtue cannot be taught: if virtue were knowledge, it would be reliably transmissible like geometry; but virtuous people regularly fail to produce virtuous children. True belief produces the right action but cannot give an account of why it is right. The distinction — not between having the right belief and having the wrong one, but between having a belief that holds by luck and having knowledge that holds by understanding — is the founding problem of analytic epistemology.
Scholarly Works
Plato's Meno — R. W. Sharples (ed.)
A scholarly edition with Greek text, translation, and commentary that covers the argument structure, the recollection doctrine, and the knowledge/true belief distinction in detail. A good first scholarly resource for the text.
Plato on Knowledge and Forms: Selected Essays — Gail Fine
Fine's essays include a rigorous treatment of the Meno's epistemology, particularly the distinction between knowledge and true belief and its relationship to the later theory of Forms. Oxford University Press, 2003.
Socrates: Ironist and Moral Philosopher — Gregory Vlastos
Vlastos's analysis of the elenctic method in the early dialogues provides essential context for the Meno's transitional position: the Meno is where the Socratic method of definition begins to give way to the Platonic doctrine of the Forms. Cornell University Press, 1991.
Lectures
Ancient Philosophy — Knowledge and Recollection in the Meno — Various, Yale University / Oxford University
The Meno is standard in university ancient philosophy and epistemology courses. Yale Open Courses and Oxford philosophy podcasts both have relevant material, and several full lecture treatments are available via YouTube.
Further Reading
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