Meno (2006)
Meno is a 2006 Greek-language early works to 1800 book written by Plato.
A confident young Athenian named Meno opens with a deceptively simple question: can virtue be taught, or does it come by practice or by nature? Socrates turns it back on him, insisting they cannot judge whether virtue is teachable until they can first say what virtue actually is. Every definition Meno offers collapses under questioning until he admits he no longer knows, and raises a famous puzzle: how can anyone search for something they do not already know? Plato's short dialogue works through this paradox with the patient, needling method that made Socrates both admired and dangerous, including a celebrated lesson drawn from an untutored boy.
Similar books
- The anatomy of melancholy (1624)
- Letters from a Stoic (1969)
- The Muqaddimah, an introduction to history (1969)
- The Arthashastra (1992)
- Against Pure Reason (1992)
- The history of the modern taste in gardening (1995)
- Jonathan Edwards' Resolutions (2001)
- A short declaration of the mystery of iniquity (1611/1612) (1998)
Explore Meno guides
A few thoughts on Meno
Readers caught by the questioning should continue with PLATO's Republic, where the search for justice widens into a whole vision of the good life, or the Phaedo for its argument about the soul. For philosophy carried by story rather than by dialogue, Jostein Gaarder's Sophie's World walks a young reader through the same Western tradition Socrates helped begin.
Plato dialogues to read next after Meno
Meno runs about forty pages and closes without an answer, which is how most of Plato's short dialogues work. These collect the rest: the trial and prison conversations, the Republic, the Statesman, and full editions if you want Socrates in order. Start with Phaedo if the recollection argument in Meno held you.
Teachers on screen who ask instead of lecture
Socrates never hands Meno a definition. He asks, waits, and lets each bad answer fall apart on its own, and Meno resents him for it. These teachers work the same room: Keating in Dead Poets Society, Merli baiting a Barcelona classroom into philosophy, and the staff of Room 222 handing students the question.
Philosophy that reads like a story instead of a textbook
Plato put his argument in a room with two people and let them talk, which is why Meno still reads as drama. These do the same work in other forms: Logicomix draws Bertrand Russell's hunt for foundations as a comic, Ship of Theseus borrows an identity puzzle for its title, and Hadot treats ancient philosophy as a way of living.
Films where a moral argument goes wrong
Meno opens by asking whether good character can be taught. These characters answer that by argument and botch it. Abe in Irrational Man reasons his way toward something ugly, the narrator of My Night at Maud's debates a principle he keeps postponing, and In the House follows a teacher who likes his student's writing too much.