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Plato’s Meno | |||
2003 • 0-941051-71-4 • paper • 100 pages • 6 x 9 • $9.95 | About the Authors | Table of Contents | Reviews | | |||
Description This fresh new edition provides a clear and faithful translation of one of the most widely taught of Plato's dialogues, by two outstanding scholars. It contains a translation into English, a short introduction, notes, standard Stephanus numbers, speech numbers, and an appendix containing a unique gallery of step-by-step geometrical diagrams.
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George Anastaplo is a Professor of Law at Loyola University of Chicago. He has published numerous wide ranging works in law, philosophy and humanities. Laurence Berns is a faculty member of St John’s College, Annapolis, where he has enjoyed a long and distinguished career.
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Introduction
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The Meno has traditionally served as an introduction to Plato’s two dozen dialogues, if not also to the millennia-long philosophic enterprise itself. Elementary questions are raised in this dialogue not only about virtue and how it may be acquired, but also about inquiry and its proper objects, about knowledge and its relation to opinion, and about the connections between learning and teaching. The dramatic form of a dialogue suggests that the character, circumstances, and actions of its participants, along with their speeches, are to be taken into account by the reader. We attempt to provide here, with a minimum of intrusion by us in the dialogue text itself, a reliable sense of what Plato has his four characters (Socrates, Meno, the Slave-boy, and Anytus) say and do. An attempt has been made, for example, to be as consistent in our translation of Greek terms as is in accordance with familiar English usage. Departures from such consistency are recorded in the endnotes. Whenever Socrates seems to deviate from what would be ordinary usage in any language, we translate literally, on the assumption that we are intended to think about what these deviations mean. Also recorded in the endnotes is other information that it may help the reader eventually to have. In addition to the traditional Stephanus page numbers for the dialogue (set forth in the outer margins of the text), we have provided numbers for the Speeches. This innovation should be useful both for beginning students and for classroom discussions, without interfering with the work of more advanced students. The illustrations for the steps taken by Socrates and the Slave-boy in their celebrated geometrical explorations are presented in unprecedented detail (in Appendix B of this volume). Such detail can help counteract the habit of the modern student of mathematics to leap as quickly as possible to the solution of a problem. We assume, that is, that Socrates is trying to reveal in detail all the steps that may be presupposed by such a mathematical problem: that is, he is interested in how one comes to understand the problem and its solution, and hence what the principles are through which it is understood. The endnotes annotating the text of the dialogue are keyed to our new Speech numbers, along with the old Stephanus numbers, but without reference to those notes in the text itself to distract the reader of the dialogue. Many readers, once it is understood who is talking and perhaps where and when, should be able to go through this dialogue without consulting any notes, except perhaps for the geometrical illustrations provided in the note for Speech 356 (86E-87B) and Appendix B of this volume. (Thus, an attempt has been made by us to permit the reader of English to come to our text much as the reader of Greek might come to Plato’s original text.) Some of the endnotes provide elementary information about now-obscure references in the text, other of them are about implications of Greek words and wordplay that no translation can convey; still others are designed to help the reader address some of the more difficult questions raised by the dialogue. The endnotes also include references to other Platonic dialogues and to some ancient and modern texts where various questions touched upon in the Meno are treated in much greater detail than it is useful to do here. (More than one-fourth of the Speeches in the Meno have at least one endnote provided for them in this volume.) Most of the exchanges in the dialogue are between Socrates, an Athenian, and Meno, a Thessalian visiting Athens. The time of the dialogue seems to be not long before Meno leaves Greece for an ill-fated military expedition in Persia. (It is well to keep in mind that the privileged Meno, for all his limitations, does seem to be able to follow easily the geometrical exercises that Socrates uses.) The infamous capital prosecution of Socrates (in 399 BCE) evidently occurred shortly after his supposed conversation presented here with Anytus, a local politician who turned out to be one of Socrates’ three accusers. It is not certain precisely where in Athens this dialogue takes place or how many are present to witness its exchanges. We have consulted, from the beginning of our joint effort, the translation of the Meno prepared in the 1960s by John Gormly for the Basic Program of Liberal Education for Adults at the University of Chicago. This is the Program in which both of us began our teaching careers half a century ago. In the main, we have used for the Greek text the Oxford edition of John Burnet. Other Greek texts drawn upon by us are indicated in the endnotes, along with references to those few occasions when we have departed from the standard modern versions of the Greek text. We have also made considerable use of the grammatical and interpretive notes in the Greek text of Meno in the Alfred Mollin and Robert Williamson volume, An Introduction to Ancient Greek. George Anastaplo Laurence Berns
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This new translation of the Meno by Anastaplo and Berns has several distinctive features that make it useful for teaching and studying the dialogue. Generally achieving a balance between clarity and faithfulness, it includes valuable annotation, two appendices...and an innovative division of the text through the provision of numbers for each of its speeches... the overall result is a text that would give a reader unschooled in Greek a fairly reliable sense of the flow of ideas in the original. -- William A. Welton, Loyola College from The Review of Metaphysics
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Plato’s Meno
