Plato's 'Meno': An interpretation

This thesis is an investigation of the relation between virtue and knowledge as elaborated in Plato's Meno. Plato's dialogue inquires into the essence of virtue and the manner in which virtue can be acquired, i.e. whether by nature, teaching, practice or in some other way. With regard to its essence, virtue is intimately associated with wisdom, i.e. some sort of knowledge. In the thesis I elaborate on the main features of wisdom: that it is a necessary condition of virtue, it can be recollected, it cannot be acquired by instruction, whether as practiced in the crafts, or as practiced by sophists, and it is not reducible to true opinion. To recollect virtue basically means to live a life of constant examination of our moral beliefs, to be engaged in dialectical inquiry, which aims at truth. With regard to the manner in which virtue can be acquired, I argue that Socrates implies that all the three factors mentioned, teaching, practice, nature, are necessary. To the extent that they are treated as complementary, the three factors have for Socrates meanings that differ from Meno's. For Meno, nature is simply the sum of features inherited by children from their parents, whereas for Socrates, what is natural is what is ontologically proper to a thing and therefore good for it, i.e. not so much an actual possession, but rather something always to live up to, a potential to be actualized. The theory of recollection discloses that kinship with the intelligible realities is part of our soul's nature, and implies that practice and learning are in fact necessary for the actualization of our soul's nature. Teaching and learning are for Meno equivalent to giving and receiving sophistic instruction, whereas for Socrates they turn out to be two complementary sides of recollection enacted by a soul that learns by drawing out truths from within itself. For Meno practice is simply memory's effort of storing opinions heard from others, while for Socrates it is exercise in dialectical inquiry.