The opening discussion of the Meno features a halting conversation in which Meno struggles at length to answer Socrates’ question, “What is Virtue?” Whereas Socrates demands a unitary account, presenting Virtue as one, Meno repeatedly speaks of Virtue in plurality. Through the opposing sides of this conflict, Plato highlights impediments that appear to prevent ordinary speakers from inquiring into nature. These include the fallibility of ordinary beliefs and statements, and the inability of ordinary speakers to countenance properties as entities in (...) their own right. In an argument often overlooked by interpreters, Plato reveals commitments implicit in ordinary discourse by which these impediments are overcome. As this argument shows, ordinary speakers such as Meno take their own terms to speak univocally and truly about a plurality of items. This is sufficient basis to proceed in dialectic, and to inquire into nature, through language. (shrink)

The complex way Meno's paradox is presented in the Meno forces reflection on both the external conditions on inquiry—its objects—and its internal conditions—the state of mind of the person who inquires. The theory of recollection does not fully account for the internal conditions—as Plato makes clear in the critique of Meno's puzzle to be found in the Euthydemus. I conclude that in the Euthydemus Plato is inviting us to reject the externalist account of knowledge urged on Socrates by the sophists (...) in favour of a more richly internalist epistemology. (shrink)

Předložená práce je textově filosofickou analýzou první části Platónova dialogu Menón, přičemž se snaží předvést, jak v konkrétním literárním díle Platónově je obsažen střet mezi silou již skomírajícího světa tradice (s jejími hodnotami lidského života), a silou jedince, který hodnoty lidského života sám pro sebe vydobyl v kritické diskusi s tradicí. Všechny tři pokusy definovat co je vlastně areté, odhalují při pečlivém rozboru pouhé rétorické střetnutí Menóna se Sókratem jako příklad střetu dvou odlišných paradigmat a sil, uvedených výše.

This article provides a rigorous defense of innate true belief in the Meno, to my knowledge, the first of its kind. While several commentators have proposed innate true belief in the past, the position has never been defended or explained in detail. Instead, the most thorough discussions of Plato’s innatism have opted for different innate objects. I defend my proposal against these recent alternatives by showing that the passages often thought to imply innate knowledge can arguably be better read in (...) other ways. I then argue that they should be so read, because of an “awareness condition” Plato had on knowledge at the time. (shrink)

Plato in the Meno is standardly interpreted as committed to condition innatism: human beings are born with latent innate states of knowledge. Against this view, Gail Fine has argued for prenatalism: human souls possess knowledge in a disembodied state but lose it upon being embodied. We argue against both views and in favor of content innatism: human beings are born with innate cognitive contents that can be, but do not exist innately in the soul as, the contents of states of (...) knowledge. Content innatism has strong textual support and constitutes a philosophically interesting theory. (shrink)