2025

June

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July

 10  17  24  31 

August

 7  14 

Week 1: Identifying the basic elements:
Plato himself, characters, and the basic questions

For this class (and ideally, each subsequent session) please have the whole of the Meno read in advance. A thorough knowledge of the text and its shape allows us to move back and forth through it. Multiple rereadings are not a waste of time. They’re a way of etching the grooves in your memory deeply enough that they become genuinely familiar.

Who — the author

Who was Plato, and what was he about? This seems like a simple question, but it's not: these dialogues are, in hard-to-determine proportions, combinations of Socrates’s experiences, the narratives that grew out of those encounters, and Plato’ collation and presentation of the ideas at the top level. (The so-called “Socratic Problem” has been addressed here from the Euthyphro course.

Who — the interlocutors (parties to the conversation)

Who was Socrates? History has lionized, virtually canonized, and wildly misinterpreted Socrates through the years. We’ll try to get a view of who he really was.

Who was Meno? Meno does not appear much outside the context of this dialogue, but he is one of Socrates’ more interesting interlocutors. Unlike some of them, he is neither a buffoon nor a sage, and he has a lively interest in questions of genuine importance..

Who was Anytus? We do meet Anytus in several places (relatively briefly) in the Apology, another of Plato’s dialogues, recording (whether accurately or not is less clear) Socrates’ speech of defense when he was on trial for his life. Anytus was one of the members of the prosecution.

Who was the slave boy? He was apparently one of Meno’s many slaves, and he appears to be quite clever, though he is never given a name. The portion of the dialogue that focuses on him is more than usually interesting, and sets up some interesting echoes with the character of Anytus.

Who — other thinkers introduced by reference, but not present in this conversation.

Who was Gorgias? Gorgias was a phenomenally successful Sophist, and there is a whole dialogue of Plato’s devoted to him. There, he is rather a pompous windbag.

Who was Protagoras? Protagoras was another Sophist, and there is another dialogue devoted to him as well. He and Socrates disagree on a number of important issues, but he is not generally presented as a buffoon. There is a range of characterization of the Sophists (all of whom Plato generally opposed) here.

What — the issues of the conversation

This dialogue primarily pivots around the question of moral and civic virtue. Meno arrives asking whether virtue can be taught. This is a question that also arises in the Protagoras. Socrates begins (as so often) by requiring a definition of terms — what is virtue? The nature of knowing is also explored later on, and there is a good deal of the conversation given over to the question of how we know what we know (a matter now factored out as a fundamental philosophical discipline called epistemology). Along the way, we ponder also how we can even ask questions to which we have no real intuition of an answer.

What is the historical background of the Meno? What is the philosophical background of Socrates’ interest in ethical concepts?