The One and the Many

In both dialogues Socrates is fighting for one type of truth, knowledge, virtue, good, and so on. Socrates' position is that if people say that virtue, or the good, can be taught, it must be one type of virtue for everyone. This is very clear in the Meno dialogue, where Meno says that there are separate virtues for all people, and Socrates argues against this. Socrates shows that the slave boy is capable of "recalling" the same sort of knowledge that anyone else is capable of learning. In the Protagoras dialogue, Protagoras also divides virtue, or the good, into several different parts, which he says are distinct and different. There is first a big battle between Socrates and Protagoras, because Socrates shows that there has to be one virtue by the method that things that are contradictory to one thing must be similar to...