Meno Dialogue With Socrates Essay

Meno dialogue with Socrates is one of five dialogues appears in the book in which Plato wrote to record some of his teacher’s philosophy. The dialogue with Meno is about the reachability of virtue. However, when Meno asks Socrates “can virtue be taught?” (Meno 70a) he claims that he do not know what is virtue so he can even know if it teachable or not.

In the beginning of the dialogue, Meno tried to define virtue to Socrates, however all of his definitions failed and could not convince Socrates, but they kind of agree on that virtue is kind of knowledge and it can be taught. Then Socrates present the theory of recollection and by questioning the slave boy about some geometries concept he prove the fact, that the person has some knowledge within

For the first hypotheses Socrates use a form of argument called Medus Pones in which the argument could be valid even if one of the premise is false. So the argument was "if virtue is a form of knowledge, it will be teachable." And as they agree that "virtue is a form of knowledge" then virtue is teachable. In the Next hypotheses, Socrates uses another form that called Medus Tullens, which usually used for refutation. The argument her is that "if virtue can be taught, there must teacher and learner. However, there are neither teacher nor learner. Therefore " virtue cannot be taught". Even though, the result are seems to be contradictory but they are logically right and that is what Socrates prove in this part of the dialogue which take us back to one of his early statement in the whole dialogue when he says" Good stranger, you must think me happy indeed if you think I know weather virtue can be taught or how it comes to be"(Meno. 71c). Socrates prove that he is in stronger position than Meno because in the end he prove that virtue is not teachable not because of its nature but because there are no qualified teacher not