Plato. - Meno and other dialogues: Oxford Worlds Classics S

OXFORD WORLDS CLASSICS

MENO AND OTHER DIALOGUES

PLATO (c.427347 BCE), Athenian philosopher-dramatist, has had a profound and lasting influence upon Western intellectual tradition. Born into a wealthy and prominent family, he grew up during the conflict between Athens and the Peloponnesian states which engulfed the Greek world from 431 to 404 BCE. Following its turbulent aftermath, he was deeply affected by the condemnation and execution of his revered master Socrates (469399) on charges of irreligion and corrupting the young. In revulsion from political activity, Plato devoted his life to the pursuit of philosophy and to composing memoirs of Socratic enquiry cast in dialogue form. He was strongly influenced by the Pythagorean thinkers of southern Italy and Sicily, which he is said to have visited when he was about 40. Some time after returning to Athens, he founded the Academy, an early ancestor of the modern university, devoted to philosophical and mathematical enquiry, and to the education of future rulers or philosopher-kings. The Academys most celebrated member was the young Aristotle (384322), who studied there for the last twenty years of Platos life. Their works mark the highest peak of philosophical achievement in antiquity, and both continue to rank among the greatest philosophers of all time.

Plato is the earliest Western philosopher from whose output complete works have been preserved. At least twenty-five of his dialogues are extant, ranging from fewer than twenty to more than three hundred pages in length. For their combination of dramatic realism, poetic beauty, intellectual vitality, and emotional power they are unique in Western literature.

ROBIN WATERFIELD has been a university lecturer (at Newcastle upon Tyne and St Andrews), and an editor and publisher. Currently, however, he is a self-employed writer, whose books range from philosophy and history to childrens fiction. He has previously translated, for Oxford Worlds Classics, Platos Republic, Symposium, Gorgias, and Phaedrus, Aristotles Physics, Herodotus Histories, Plutarchs Greek Lives and Roman Lives, Euripides Orestes and Other Plays and Heracles and Other Plays, Xenophons The Expedition of Cyrus, and The First Philosophers: The Presocratics and the Sophists.

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PLATO

Charmides, Laches, Lysis, Meno

Translated with an Introduction and Notes by
ROBIN WATERFIELD

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British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data

Data available

Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data

Plato.

[Dialogues. English. Selections]

Meno and other dialogues/Plato; translated with an introduction
and notes by Robin Waterfield.
p. cm.(Oxford worlds classics)

Includes bibliographical references (p.) and index.
1. Philosophy. I. Waterfield, Robin, 1952 II. Title.
III. Oxford worlds classics (Oxford University Press)
B358. W38 2005 184dc22 2004030366
ISBN 0192804251 9780192804259

1
Typeset in Ehrhardt
by RefineCatch Ltd, Bungay, Suffolk
Printed in Great Britain by
Clays Ltd, St Ives plc., Suffolk

One plausible view of Socrates is that he did not really have a philosophy, in the sense of a body of doctrine, so much as a method of philosophical enquiry. This volume contains four Platonic dialogues. Three of them are usually taken to be canonical dialogues of searchthat is, dialogues in which Plato portrays Socrates using his method of enquirywhile the fourth, Meno, shows Socrates above all working through issues thrown up by his method of enquiry. And it is usually thought that the three dialogues of search (Charmides, Laches, and Lysis) the bulk of the dialogue raises fruitful questions which are designed to overcome difficulties raised by the search.

Socrates method of enquiry is also known as the elenchus. The word is a transliteration of a Greek word at whose heart is the idea of challenge or of testing. In Platos Apology of Socrateshis largely fictitious version of the defence speech Socrates delivered before the Athenians at his trial in 399 BCESocrates explains that, in response to the famous Delphic oracle which declared that there was no one wiser than Socrates, he began to question people, to see if they really knew what they thought they knew. He challenged them, then, and invariably found that they had no more than superficial knowledge, or beliefs inherited from somewhere but not fully thought out, and not part of a coherent system of beliefs; they did not have anything which had the stability and certainty one would expect from knowledge. And so elenchus in the sense of challenge very often took on the aggressive sense of refutation, and the dialogues of search tend to end in