The Christian Vanguard

The following is an essay I wrote on Meno's Paradox.  Meno raises a problem concerning whether inquiries or a search for knowledge is, in principle, possible. Meno objects, “How will you look for it, Socrates, when you do not know at all what it is?...If you should meet with it, how will you know that this is the thing you did not know?” Socrates takes the word “it” here to refer to the form, or a standard, particularly the standard of virtue, although Socrates applies the problem to the search of any standard whatsoever. It isn’t certain that limiting the problem to the search for standards is what Meno had in mind, as Socrates first calls the argument a kind of debaters trick. Nonetheless, Socrates narrows the argument to just the search of standards when he says, “He cannot search for what he knows-since he knows it, there is no need to search-nor for what he does not know, for he does not know what to look for.” For example, suppose you didn’t know how to use the metri...

There is this common saying that once you cease desiring a thing, you will then obtain it. A friend recently told me that I will finally have a girlfriend when I stop looking for one. This seems paradoxical. Take some other desire, like the well-being of your child. Then, some maniac who likes to see you suffer tortures your child because he will get the response desired from you. However, when he sees that once you become indifferent to your child's well-being, he stops torturing your child. So, what is the right thing here to do? In the same way, there is a sense in which pursuing marriage and pursuing a relationship is a good thing, like pursuing the well-being of your child is a good thing, and so the refusal to pursue that good is an immoral thing to do. One difference that can be appealed to here is that one has a duty to your child, but not a duty to pursuing a relationship, so the dilemma doesn't exist in not wanting to want to be in a relationship (whoa...meta). O...