Epistemology

Meno

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Plato

385 BC

A dialogue on whether virtue can be taught, which opens into a deeper inquiry into the nature of knowledge and learning itself. When Meno asks how one can enquire into something one does not already know, Socrates responds with the theory of recollection: learning is not the acquisition of new knowledge but the recovery of what the soul already knew before birth. The famous demonstration with an uneducated slave boy — who solves a geometry problem through Socrates's questioning alone — is one of the most celebrated passages in all of philosophy.