Topic > Compare and contrast Socrates and Plato's view of man...

However, Meno asks a question that Socrates classifies as “the debater's argument”. The reasoning is this: “How will you look for it, Socrates, if you don't know what it is at all? How will you aim to search for something you don't know at all? If you met him, how will you know that this is the thing you did not know” (Plato 70)? Meno wonders how they will know what they are looking for if they have no preliminary idea of ​​what it is, and if they find it, how will they know. Because they have no idea what they are looking for, Meno believes that even if they stumble upon the true meaning of virtue they will have no way of knowing that they have. Socrates counters this argument by inserting his idea of ​​the immortal soul. Socrates claims that we all have an immortal soul, which already possesses all the knowledge that we as humans need. However, we as humans simply need to discover the knowledge within ourselves. As a result of this concept of the immortal soul, Socrates believes that once they encounter what they are looking for they will know they have found