Plato's Meno

In thesmall world of the Meno,one of the early Platonic Dialogues, often crit­icized for being ambiguous or inconclu­sive, or for being a lame and needless concession to popular morals, two dis­tinguished philosophers find a perspec­tive on much of twentieth-century phi­losophy.

According to Sternfeld and Zyskind, the key to the Meno's appeal is in its philosophy of man as acquisitive--in the dialogue's notion of thought and action as a process of acquiring. Themeans of acquiring values and cogni­tions provides the context in which the mind has most direct contact with them, which grounds common sense generally and ties the dialogue techni­cally to the emphasis on the im­mediacies of the mind--language, ex­perience, and process--in much of re­cent philosophy.

Sternfeld and Zyskind proffer Plato'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's world to rest, however, precariously, even today.