Protagoras and Meno

This book is fascinating. I always feel like such a dullard reading this stuff. I have trouble following the arguments and noticing logic issues that the writer of the introduction never fails to point out. What’s more these Greeks seem like pretty sharp cookies, at least compared to me. Plato seems to have spent a great deal of time thinking about things in a precise way, whereas I, have not. My mind feels like a Dorito munching couch potato trying to keep up with a sprinter.

Meno has a great bit about nature of knowledge. Plato says that there are two types of knowledge, empirical and a priori. Empirical knowledge can only be learned through instruction, eg. you can’t know that a square is called a “square” unless someone tells you this, but you can figure out all of its properties on your own. A priori knowledge does not require teaching, and, in fact cannot be taught, it has to be figured out by the person. Plato believes that one doesn’t so much as learn this type of knowledge as recall it from a time before birth.

Plato gives a demonstration of this a priori knowledge by getting a slave to figure out a geometric theory, merely by asking the slave a series of leading questions.

The rest of the book is a discussion of the nature of virtue which is also quite entertaining. All in all its a quick read.

14 November 2007 | Books | Comments