Plato's Meno (Cambridge Studies in the Dialogues of Plato)

Given its brevity, Plato's Meno covers an astonishingly wide array of topics: politics, education, virtue, definition, philosophical method, mathematics, the nature and acquisition of knowledge, and immortality. Its treatment of these, though profound, is tantalizingly short, leaving the reader with many unresolved questions. This book confronts the dialogue's many enigmas and attempts to solve them in a way that is both lucid and sympathetic to Plato's philosophy. Reading the dialogue as a whole, it explains how different arguments are related to one another, and how the interplay between characters is connected to the philosophical content of the work. In a new departure, this book's exploration focuses primarily on the content and coherence of the dialogue in its own right, and not merely in the context of Plato’s other works, making it required reading for all students of Plato, whether they are from the world of classics or philosophy.
• Offers a lucid new interpretation of one of the most broad-ranging of Plato's dialogues • Tackles the dialogue's enigmas in a manner sympathetic to Plato's philosophy • Accessible to both classicists and philosophers
Acknowledgements; Introduction; Part I: 1. The opening; 2. The first definition; 3. A lesson in definition; 4. The third definition; 5. Meno as an interlocutor; Part II: 6. The stingray; 7. 'Meno's paradox'; 8. The emergence of recollection; 9. The argument for recollection; 10. The conclusion; Part III: 11. The method of hypothesis; 12. Virtue is teachable; 13. Virtue is not teachable; 14. Virtue as true belief; 15. Irony in the Meno: the evidence of the Gorgias; 16. Meno's progress; Conclusion; Appendices; References; Index of ancient passages; General index.