Meditation on the provisional failure of the philosophical investigation from the Meno

Abstract

This is a meditation on the role that failure —sometimes provisional, sometimes final— plays in all philosophical inquiry. The resource to carry out this exercise is offered by Plato in the Meno, the first part of which very well illustrates the situation of an investigation that, halfway through, must change course because it has entered a blind alley. As soon as it started, the dialogue became involved in a series of attempts that led the researchers (Socrates and Meno, on the one hand; the writer of the dialogue and its reader, on the other) to an impasse in the investigation, which ended finally in failure and forces to restart the work from the beginning, exactly in the middle of the text of the Meno.