Plato's Meno

In the small world of the Meno, one of the early Platonic Dialogues, often crit{u00AD}icized for being ambiguous or inconclu{u00AD}sive, or for being a lame and needless concession to popular morals, two dis{u00AD}tinguished philosophers find a perspec{u00AD}tive on much of twentieth-century phi{u00AD}losophy. According to Sternfeld and Zyskind, the key to the Meno{u2019}s appeal is in its philosophy of man as acquisitive{u2014}in the dialogue{u2019}s notion of thought and action as a process of acquiring. The means of acquiring values and cogni{u00AD}tions provides the context in which the mind has most direct contact with them, which grounds common sense generally and ties the dialogue techni{u00AD}cally to the emphasis on the im{u00AD}mediacies of the mind{u2014}language, ex{u00AD}perience, and process{u2014}in much of re{u00AD}cent philosophy. Sternfeld and Zyskind proffer Plato{u2019}s 2,000-year-old philosophy as valid still in competition with other, and more modern, modes of thought, and suggest the need for a major turn in philosophy which can take us beyond its minimal philosophy without distorting the basic values on which the Meno shows man{u2019}s world to rest, however, precariously, even today.