Note 13 — Chapter XXII · MENON.

These examples of trial, error, and exposure, have great value and reflect high credit on Plato, when we regard them as an intellectual or propædeutic discipline, forcing upon hearers an attention to useful logical distinctions at a time when there existed no systematic grammar or logic. But surely they must appear degraded, as they are presented in the Prolegomena of Stallbaum, and by some other critics. We are there told that Plato’s main purpose in this dialogue was to mock and jeer the Sophists and their pupil, and that for this purpose Sokrates is made to employ not his own arguments but arguments borrowed from the Sophists themselves — “ut callidé suam ipsius rationem occultare existimandus sit, quo magis illudat Sophistarum alumnum” (p. 15). “Quæ quidem argumentatio” (that of Sokrates) “admodum cavendum est ne pro Socraticâ vel Platonicâ accipiatur. Est enim prorsus ad mentem Sophistarum aliorumque id genus hominum comparata,” &c. (p. 16). Compare pp. 12-13 seq.

The Sophists undoubtedly had no distinct consciousness, any more than other persons, of these logical distinctions, which were then for the first pressed forcibly upon attention.