Meno

In a bustling Athenian garden, the young aristocrat Meno poses a timeless question: can virtue be taught? Socrates admits he cannot even define virtue itself, prompting a lively back‑and‑forth in which Meno offers several tentative formulas—power to command, the delight in honourable things—each of which the philosopher gently unravels as circular or incomplete. Their exchange reveals how easily common‑place notions collapse under careful scrutiny, leaving both men aware of their own perplexities.

Undeterred, Socrates turns the dialogue toward the nature of learning itself. He raises the famous paradox of inquiry—how can one search for something one does not know—and suggests that the soul carries a hidden store of all knowledge, recalled when the right questions are asked. To illustrate, he leads Meno’s shy slave through a brief series of geometric probes, coaxing the youth to state a basic relation about the diagonal of a square, thereby hinting that learning may be the remembrance of what the soul already knows.