Plato's Cave What Plato said: Plato's cave which is also known by various other names such as “The Allegory of the cave”, “The Analogy of the cave” or “The parable of the cave” is an allegory or depiction or say a story used by the Greek philosopher Plato in his work- “The Republic”, to illustrate our nature in education and the want of education. The views are expressed in the form of a dialogue between Plato's teacher Socrates and Plato's brother Glaucon. There are views that the dialogue is fictitious and made up by Plato, that he is just using his teacher to express his own ideas. In fact most of the work by socrates is doubted the same way. Many people doubt that socrates was not a real living soul but nothing more than a fictional character …show more content…
All of the Socrates we know is thus known as the Platonic Socrates,i.e., Socrates as shown to us or as figured by Plato. There is a nice discussion on this topic on StackExchange link of which is given below: http://philosophy.stackexchange.com/questions/2484/ was-socrates-a-fictional-character-invented-by-platoSo returning to Plato's cave, Socrates asks Glaucon to imagine a cave in which some prisoners are chained from childhood and they are not able to move their heads,legs or hands since they are chained and they sit facing a wall. Behind the wall there is fire so that shadows can be casted on the wall in a similar way a projector casts images on a screen. There are a few men in between the fire and the prisoners who casts shadows from objects of the shape of humans, animals as well as other everyday items and thus try to create a sort of story from that on the wall. The prisoners who are able to see only the wall and the shadows created on them are unaware of the reality and they think that only what they see on the wall is real since they have not seen anything else in