Meno

A dialogue that opens with Meno asking whether virtue can be taught. Socrates says he does not even know what virtue is, and Meno's attempted definitions keep naming parts of virtue instead of the whole. Frustrated, Meno compares Socrates to a stingray that numbs its victims and poses the paradox of inquiry: how can you look for something if you do not know what it is? Socrates answers with the theory of recollection, the idea that learning is remembering what the soul already knew, and tests it on an untaught slave boy who, through questions alone, works out how to double the area of a square. The pair then reason from a hypothesis: if virtue is knowledge, it can be taught. The politician Anytus, later one of Socrates' accusers, enters and bristles when told that great Athenians failed to teach their sons. The dialogue ends by contrasting knowledge with true belief.

In a few pages it raises the paradox of inquiry, innate knowledge and the difference between knowledge and true belief, questions epistemology is still working on.