In the_ _small 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. The_ _means 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. (shrink)

It seems to me that a more significant evaluation of the rationalists' work is possible if we focus attention on the differences in their treatments of the fundamental philosophical problems of reason and necessity. This is so, I believe, because we can find relevant connections between their treatment of these problems, their treatment of metaphysical problems, and current treatments of similar problems. Such an inquiry will reveal both a clearer notion of the rationalists' own conception of the proper structure for (...) philosophy, and of the limitations of the philosophic enterprise as they conceived it. This result can be compared significantly to the current conceptions of the limitations of philosophy. (shrink)

The body of this paper develops the following subjects, as they are, I believe, the essential elements in the structure of Hume's Enquiry.