Plato's Meno: A Philosophy of Man as Acquisitive (Philosophical Explorations)

By Harold Zyskind and Robert Sternfeld

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.

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 080930838X
• ISBN13: 9780809308385
• Release Date: May 1978
• Publisher: Southern Illinois University Press
• Length: 192 Pages
• Weight: 1.10 lbs.
• Dimensions: 9.3" x 0.8" x 6.1"