Back to category: Miscellaneous

Limited version - please login or register to view the entire paper.

A Discussion of Meno

Many times parents have this little game they like to play: when a child comes and asks a question the parent often tells the child to look it up. This could serve any number of purposes. Maybe the parent doesn’t know the answer and would rather not admit that to their child. The most common purpose may be that parents want their children to learn how to think critically and find the answers, or develop them, on their own. This is a very useful skill to have, for how many of us always have someone around to give us the easy way out? In Plato’s Meno, Socrates is approached by Meno and asked, “can virtue be taught? Or is it not teachable but the result of practice, or is it neither of these, but men possess it by nature or in some other way?” (3) Socrates doesn’t quite take the easy way out and send Meno away, but he doesn’t just give the answer either. He starts a discussion of many concepts that will eventually, though not until the end, answer the original question....

Posted by: Melissa T. Littlefield

Limited version - please login or register to view the entire paper.