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Scene setting and character development. We meet Socrates and Meno, also Gorgias and (these last two are characters of a sort): Thessaly and Athens. Meno’s question: is virtue teachable. Socrates: first we’d better find out what it is. Meno: Gorgias knows. Socrates: Well, then. . . what does he know?

Meno’s swarm of virtues. Socrates demands a general definition. Comparison of virtue to strength and health – but Meno is skeptical about the analogy. Comparison to justice and moderation, to explain the necessity of a general account.

Meno: virtue is the capacity to rule. Socrates: that can’t be right. Meno: justice is virtue. Socrates: is justice virtue or is it one kind of virtue? Analogy to shape and color to explain the genus-species problem here.

Definitional detour. Meno: what is shape? Socrates: shape invariably accompanies color. What if I don’t know what color is? How such disputes should be handled – and a touch of geometry: shape is the limit of a solid. Meno: but what is color? A touch of Empedoclean physics: color is an ‘effluvium’ off objects. Socrates disdains his own ‘theatrical’ account.

Meno: virtue is to want the best and to get it. Socrates: no one ever wants bad things. So the question comes down to the getting – by fair means or foul. Meno admits that the good things should be gotten justly. Back to virtue-as-justice. Meno is guilty, again, of trying to define the species by means of a single species.

Socrates as stingray. Meno: how can you look for something if you don’t know what it is? Socrates on priests, poetry and Persephone: no pain, no gain. And: learning is recollection.

Meno: in what sense is learning ‘recollection’? And how could one prove it? The slave boy’s geometry lesson, part I: descent into the darkness of perplexity. Lesson from the lesson: the positive value of paralysis. It is better to be confused and know it than to be confused and not know it.

The slave boy’s geometry lesson, part II: up from the depths of perplexity. The lesson from the lesson: ‘the man who does not know has within him true opinions about what he does not know.’ The importance of inquiring into Being in earnest.

Back to the original question: is virtue teachable? An investigation by hypothesis: what would virtue have to be like to be teachable? Answer: knowledge. Therefore, if virtue is knowledge, it is teachable. Virtue is good in itself. So: is there anything good in itself that isn’t knowledge? No. Virtue as ‘mindfulness’. Two sub-arguments: 1) if virtue were innate, it would be recognizable but is not; 2) since virtue is ‘mindfulness’, i.e. knowledge, it should be teachable.

Counter-argument: if virtue were knowledge, there should be teachers of it, and students. But there do not appear to be any. Anytus appears and is questioned: who should Meno go to, to learn virtue? The sophists? No. Rather, any Athenian gentleman. But why, then, have so many of these gentlemen failed to teach their sons virtue? Therefore, virtue cannot be taught.

Are the sophists teachers of virtues? Meno: I don’t think so. Gorgias: you should turn people into clever speakers. Contradictory hints from the poets: virtue can, and cannot, be taught. There seem to be no teachers of virtue, and therefore no learners. Virtue cannot be taught. How, then, do good men come to be?

Knowledge versus true belief. The advantage of the former is that it doesn’t ‘run away’, like a statue of Daedalus. The importance of being lucky: success in public affairs is not a matter of wisdom but of divine inspiration. Virtue is a gift of from the gods.