Plato’s Meno

Week 3: What is virtue / excellence?

For this class (and ideally, each subsequent session) please have the whole of the Meno read in advance. In particular, though, today we will be concentrating on 71d-77a of the Meno.

Socrates’ suppositions

Socrates insists that to know whether virtue is teachable, one must know what it is.

Socrates also assumes that knowing what virtue is means that we can define it.

These both seem like intuitively correct observations...but are they? To pose a couple of counterexamples, I (Dr McM — I daren’t speak for Mr. Oles)...

...really do not know what tensor calculus is, though I have heard the term from my more scientifically wizardly friends. Some of them have apparently studied it, and I am willing to accept from their reports that at least some of those have indeed learned what it was. Is it not valid, then, for me to think that it is therefore teachable, even if I (knowing the name but not what it refers to) don’t know what it’s about?

...have eaten foods that I liked, before I had any clue about what went into them (and hence what they are, in that sense of the term). Must I be able to distinguish, say, a genuine vanilla egg custard from a vanilla cornstarch pudding in theory in order to be able to taste or discern the difference, or even form preferences among them?

How essential are these suppositions for us? Are they binding on our thinking as we pursue the rest of the dialogue?

Meno begins to try to answer Socrates.

Meno’s first response.

Meno’s second response.

Meno’s third response.