Ethical Intuition and the Immortal Soul in Plato’s Meno

Hage, Samuel P.

doi:10.5840/acpaproc202397183

Proceedings of the American Catholic Philosophical Association

Volume 97, 2023

The Human Person

Samuel P. Hage

Pages 81-91

https://doi.org/10.5840/acpaproc202397183

Ethical Intuition and the Immortal Soul in Plato’s Meno

The frequent consideration in Plato’s dialogues of issues like the immortality of the soul, the resemblance of the intellect to the divine, and eternal reward and punishment make manifest his metaphysical kinship with Christian thought. Some contemporary interpreters, however, have argued that Plato is really an atheist and a materialist, and that his ethics, psychology, and metaphysics are merely exoteric. Their cynicism turns out to contain an important insight: if Plato’s theories of soul are a lie, then all his moral thinking fails too. This paper argues that geometry as a proof of the myth of recollection, in the context of Meno’s inquiry about virtue, points us toward the importance of immortality for ethics. It posits a connection specifically between the special case of incommensurable magnitudes and the question of virtue’s teachability; that is, between the innate human capacity to apprehend the indemonstrable first principles of both mathematics and ethics.

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