Some Philosophy Questions - Essay Example

However, Meno’s next proposal is that, virtue has the capability of exercising power over people. Socrates opposes this proposal on two grounds: first, it not honorable for children or slaves themselves to exercise power over people, and secondly, presiding over people is only virtuous if at all it is done justly. This opinion influences Meno to immediately consider virtue as being justice. But he then gives in to Socrates that integrity is a kind of virtue but not virtue itself. Since Meno is more competence, he attempts to classify virtue again, this time suggesting that it concerned with longing for good things and obtaining the power to protect them but provided that one does so justly (Plato 33-37).

However, his definition again stumbles upon the predicament of using “justice” in defining virtue. So because of him being very talkative, he even starts to contrast Socrates to an animal with the name torpedo fish, claiming that it numbs anything it touches. This disturbs Socrates responding that learning is not just finding out something new, but rather recollecting something that the essence had the information about before birth, and has forgotten since then. We see him trying to review the clear picture of what he meant, by calling one of Meno’s slave boys, drawing a square containing sides of two feet, and then ask the boy to make calculation of how lengthy would be the face of a square, if it happened to contain twice an area belonging to the one he had just drawn.

After the boy gets a wrong answer, Socrates helps him to recognize the correct answer without essentially explaining anything that would force the boy into solving the problem on his own. If the boy reaches into a conclusion on his own with no direct teaching, then he must have been summoning up something he already knew. Socrates proposes two hypotheses on the subject of virtue, in order to totally convince Meno. The first verbalizes that, if integrity is a category of knowledge, then teaching is a key factor and second, if it exists anything good that isn’t knowledge, the possibility is that virtue is not a class of knowledge (Plato 59-63).

He later concludes that virtue is wisdom either in general or parts and therefore it cannot be something that people are born with. He also says that virtue is not necessarily a product of knowledge but of factual belief. And that it is a topic of being capable of giving a report of what people knows, just like it is reviewed by the slave boy with the mathematical proof. Question two Descartes totally agrees that mind is completely different from body by establishing two motive factors, the religious and the scientific motive that makes his argument called real distinction.

The religious motivation provides a rational starting point for a trust in the soul’s immortality. The scientific motivation emphasis that the nature of mind is absolutely distinctive as of that belonging to the body, hence paving way for Descartes’ description called the new mechanistic physics. The argument therefore shows that there could be possibility for one existing without the other. In religious motivation, Descartes’ purpose of reviewing that human intelligence or soul is really different from body is to refute the irreligious people.

This is because they only believe in mathematics and that they would not