Meno
outline
- Question: is virtue
teachable?
- How do we decide such a
question? — not empirically, but rather a priori, on the basis of
investigating the nature of the subject (just as in answering the question
whether the sum of the angles of a triangle equals two right angles we
should know what a triangle is)
- Thus the new question is:
what is virtue?
- How do we answer a question
of this type? Not by a list 71e. (Easier example: color is an effluvium
from shapes which fits the sight and is perceived.) Not by means of
irrelevant differences. 78b And not in a circle. 79c
- Meno, "benumbed",
"stung by the torpedo fish": what if the question is
unanswerable? 80
- Meno’s paradox: you either know
what you are looking for or you don’t. If you knew it, you wouldn’t look
for it. If you don’t know it, then you don’t know what to look for. 81
- Socrates: don’t lose heart, wise
men and women have a beautiful doctrine; recollection. Enter the slave boy.
- Big question: did he really
know the answer, or Socrates told him? If he knew, how did he? (First
major discussion topic.)
- Moral: inquiry is possible
86c
- Back to the original
question. It is answerable even without a full investigation of the nature
of virtue, by means of a hypothesis. 86e
- If virtue is
knowledge/wisdom, then it is teachable 87d
- But virtue is
knowledge/wisdom 87d-88d
- Corollaries 89b-c
- Major difficulty (89e): how
come virtue does not have teachers?
- Confrontation of the
"ideal" situation, described by the a priori conclusion,
with the "real" situation, known on empirical grounds. Anytus’s
dramatic appearance is but the symbolic expression of the intrusion of the
material, empirical "reality", into the realm of the
intellectually grasped world of "ideas" and "ideals".
- The "resolution"
(or rather, explanation) of the conflict between ideal and empirical (second
major discussion topic): real virtue is wisdom; empirical
virtue (the virtue of virtuous Athenians) is not wisdom, since it is
based on mere (though correct) opinion.
- Hence, empirical virtue is
not real virtue, it’s only a shadow of real virtue (Socrates’s
conclusion)
- Drink hemlock, Socrates, if
you teach things like this about the Athenians to our youth (the
Athenians’ conclusion).