Reading group: Plato’s Meno, from Meno’s paradox to the statues of Daedalus, in two weeks

A short dialogue with a long afterlife. The Meno starts with a simple question, can virtue be taught?, and within a few pages has raised most of the problems epistemology still argues about.

What to read: the whole dialogue, about forty pages. Jowett's translation is in the public domain and freely available online; any modern translation will do.

Week 1 (70a–86c). Meno's attempts to define virtue fail. Frustrated, he poses his famous paradox (80d–e): how can you search for something if you do not know what it is, and how would you recognise it if you found it? Socrates answers with the theory that learning is recollection, and demonstrates it with an enslaved boy who, by answering questions, works out how to draw a square double the size of a given one (82b–85b).

Week 2 (86c–100c). Can virtue be taught after all? Anytus, who would later be one of Socrates' accusers, enters angrily. Then the passage that still matters most: true opinion is as good a guide as knowledge for getting to Larissa, so why prize knowledge? Because true opinions are like the statues of Daedalus, which run away unless tied down, and they are tied down by working out the reason why (97d–98a).

Questions to bring: is the boy recollecting, or is Socrates leading him? And is Plato's answer to why knowledge beats true belief still the best one we have?