Plato and Aristotle on Meno's Paradox and al-Fârâbî's attempt to reconcile the two philosophers on this issue

Meno's Paradox, located in Plato's Meno, questions the possibility of inquiry and learning. The Paradox, playing the role of a springboard, has paved the way for many issues such as the nature of learning and epistemological development in the history of epistemology, first with the raise of Plato's Theory of Recollection based on an innate knowledge and then of the theory of perception-based knowledge developed by Aristotle against it. In Meno, the framework of the problem is determined as follows: Successful inquiry and learning is impossible, for either you already know the subject you are inquiring into – in which case the inquiry is meaningless and unnecessary – or you do not know – in which case you cannot inquire the subject in anyway. Plato's solution is the Theory of Recollection. While this theory does not provide a satisfactory explanation of how our epistemological development occur, it also doesn't have any explanatory power on how our knowledge is ultimately emerged. Aristotle's main solution for overcoming the problem does not lie in the passages (Posterior Analytics I.1 and Prior Analytics II.21) in which he explicitly refers to Meno. Aristotle, in these sections, deals with a completely different problem. His original answer lies in the second book of Posterior Analytics in which the learning through definition is being discussed (especially II.8) and the learning through induction (II.19), which gives the "preliminary accounts" of the subject to be defined. Al-Fârâbî, in his work, The Harmonization of the Two Opinions of the Two Sages, Plato the Divine and Aristotle, where he elaborates on the two philosophers' ideas about the source of knowledge, seeks to harmonize Plato's and Aristotle's solutions for Meno's Paradox into a common solution. Al-Fârâbî in al-Jam' tries to reconcile these two solutions around a form of learning which he describes as "recollection" based on an already existing pre-knowledge (universals) available in mind. The type of learning taking place in this joint proposal does not provide an adequate solution for Meno's Paradox, as it does not lead to the ultimate source of knowledge about how a new concept is formed without any preliminary assumption.