The Plato Paradigm

Ivor Ludlam: A Critical Analysis and Interpretation of Plato’s Meno

Click here to find a structural analysis of Plato’s Meno, with diagrams, commentary, a podcast series, and extracts from the book Meno: How Plato Intended the Dialogue to be Read.

Traditional View

• The dialogue explores whether virtue can be taught.
• Meno wants Socrates to teach him virtue.
• The paradox of inquiry introduces the theory of recollection.
• The geometrical exercise with the slave is intended to prove the theory.
• The hypothetical method anticipates later Platonic methodology.
• The dialogue ends inconclusively.

This Analysis

• The characters of the dialogue represent various states of cognition. The philosophical import of the dialogue is dramatized through the characters.
• Understanding the characters requires working through the perverse conversation between the characters. The dialogue is thus an exercise in dialectical thinking.
• “Meno’s Paradox”, the “Theory of Recollection”, and the “demonstration” with the slave, are all deliberately perverse, but dramatically necessary.

The Plato Paradigm

The Plato Paradigm also includes my analyses of other Platonic dialogues, my critical edition and commentary on the Life, Works and Logic of the Stoic Antipater of Tarsus, essays on the Jesuit Bellarmine’s Stoicizing treatment of Aristotle and the development of the concept of the probable, from Greek rhetoric to very near Pascal, but not quite.