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.