A dialogue where Socrates and the young aristocrat Meno ask whether virtue can be taught, and Socrates demonstrates learning as recollection using a slave boy and a geometry problem.
Meno opens with a blunt question: can virtue be taught, or trained by practice, or does it come by nature? Meno, a wealthy young visitor from Thessaly trained in rhetoric by Gorgias, is confident he can define virtue on demand, but each of his answers collapses under Socrates' questioning -- virtue turns out to differ for every kind of person (man, woman, child, ruler, slave) in Meno's telling, which cannot be right if virtue is one thing with one name. Meno accuses Socrates of casting a numbing spell on him, comparing him to a stingray, and asks how anyone can search for something when they would not recognize it even if they found it -- the famous 'Meno's paradox' about the impossibility of inquiry.
Socrates answers with the theory that learning is recollection (anamnesis): the soul, existing before birth, already possesses knowledge, so what looks like new learning is really the soul being reminded of what it once knew. He proves the point on the spot with one of Meno's household slaves, a boy who has never studied geometry. Through pure questioning, no telling, Socrates leads the boy from a wrong guess (that doubling a square's side doubles its area) to the correct construction of a square with double the area, using the diagonal. The boy's false confidence is replaced by a puzzled awareness of ignorance, and then by real understanding -- Socrates argues this progression is only possible if the truths were latent in him all along.
The dialogue returns to virtue armed with this method, reasoning 'from a hypothesis': if virtue is a kind of knowledge, it can be taught; if it is not, it cannot. Anytus, Meno's companion (later one of Socrates' actual prosecutors), joins the conversation and grows hostile when Socrates argues that even Athens' most admired statesmen -- Themistocles, Aristides, Pericles -- never produced sons or students as capable as themselves, suggesting their success was not teachable knowledge. Socrates ends by proposing that virtue in such men is not knowledge at all but a kind of divine, unaccountable good judgment or inspiration, like that of poets and prophets -- true but ungrounded opinion, not understanding. The dialogue closes without resolving what virtue actually is, leaving the inquiry open.
“Can you tell me, Socrates, whether virtue is something that can be taught? Or if not taught, then trained into a person by practice? Or is it neither taught nor practiced, but comes to people by nature, or in some other way?”
— Meno · read this chapter →
“Tell me, boy, do you know that a square figure is like this? BOY: I do.”
— Meno · read this chapter →
“You see, Meno, I am not teaching him anything, only asking questions throughout?”
— Meno · read this chapter →
“So the eight-foot figure doesn't come from the three-foot line either, after all.”
— Meno · read this chapter →
“excellence appears to come to us as a gift from the gods, to whoever it comes to”
— Meno · read this chapter →
It is a dialogue in which Socrates and the young Meno debate whether virtue can be taught, learned by practice, or comes by nature. The discussion turns into a broader inquiry into what knowledge and learning actually are, illustrated by a geometry demonstration with a slave boy.
Meno objects that inquiry seems impossible: if you don't know what you're looking for, you won't recognize it when you find it, and if you already know it, there's nothing to search for. Socrates answers this with the theory that learning is really recollection of knowledge the soul already possesses.
Socrates questions one of Meno's household slaves, a boy with no training in geometry, about how to construct a square with double the area of a given square. Through questions alone, without ever telling him the answer, Socrates leads the boy from a wrong guess to the correct construction using the diagonal, offered as proof that the boy is recollecting latent knowledge rather than being taught.
No. Socrates argues that if virtue were knowledge it could be taught, but since Athens' most admired statesmen never produced students as capable as themselves, virtue in them looks less like teachable knowledge and more like divinely inspired true opinion. The dialogue ends without settling what virtue itself is.
Anytus is Meno's companion in the dialogue, a prominent Athenian who grows angry when Socrates questions whether famous statesmen like Themistocles and Aristides truly taught virtue to anyone. This is the same Anytus who later became one of the accusers at Socrates' trial.
It is Socrates' proposal that the soul existed before birth and already knows all truths, so what looks like learning in this life is the soul being reminded of, or recollecting, what it once knew. The geometry demonstration with the slave boy is offered as evidence for this.
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