the Meno

Second of three sessions on the Meno coming up this afternoon (my only class this semester is Intro, which we call Philosophical Thinking here, oddly numbered PHIL 220 for institutional-historical reasons I still don’t understand after more than a decade at AUC).

Though it’s a relatively short and simple piece of philosophy, I find more in the Meno each time I read it. Despite the literary and sometimes satirical structure of the dialogue, it packs more serious philosophical questions into 30 pages than just about any other work I can think of. To exceed its level of important questions per page, you’d have to go to something deliberately compressed like Leibniz’s Monadology.