The Meno: Learning as Recollection

In Plato's Meno, a young aristocrat asks Socrates whether virtue can be taught, and the conversation turns into a puzzle about learning itself. Meno argues that inquiry is impossible: if you know something, you need not search for it, and if you do not know it, you would not recognize it when you found it. Socrates answers with the theory of recollection (anamnesis): the soul existed before birth and already knows the truth, so learning is really remembering.

To demonstrate, he questions an enslaved boy with no training in geometry and guides him, step by step, to see that a square with double the area is built on the diagonal of the original. Critics point out that Socrates' questions are leading, but the scene raises a lasting question: does knowledge come entirely from experience, or does the mind bring something of its own? That question later divided rationalists and empiricists.