meno · plato

Plato's Meno asks whether virtue can be taught and gets nowhere until Socrates shows that nobody present can even say what virtue is. Along the way it poses the paradox of inquiry and answers it with the theory of recollection, demonstrated by leading a slave boy to a geometrical truth he did not know he knew.

Plato, Meno, in Plato: Complete Works, edited by John M. Cooper and D. S. Hutchinson (Hackett Publishing, 1997). Read in Freshman Fall at Torrey Honors.