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The Collected Dialogues In The Allegory Of The Cave By Plato

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Plato: The Collected Dialogues (428-348 B.C) Book 7 (514-521) - The Allegory of the Cave This book is about The Allegory of the Cave, a dialogue that is taking place between Socrates and Glaucon. We are to imagine a cave filled with prisoners who have been bound and unable to move their bodies or even turn their necks therefore making them immobile. They have been bound since birth and are only to look at the stonewall that is in front of them. There is a fire behind the prisoners and in between them is a walkway where puppeteers are carrying objects, which make a shadow. The prisoners naturally assume that the objects that they are seeing on the wall are real. The prisoners begin asking each other about details about the objects and play
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Plato tells us that the prisoners are confused on their emergence from the cave and that the prisoners’ will be blinded once they had been freed from the cave. After a period of time they will adjust their eyesight and begin to understand the true reality that the world poses. The stubbornness to develop a different perspective is seen in much of today’s society. The allegory of the cave is an understanding of what the true world is and how many people never see it because of their views of the society they are raised in.

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Plato compares a number of things in this essay- the material world to the world of ideas, the life of the mind to work of governing, silver and gold to virtue and wisdom. How does he use his comparisons to make his arguments? 2.)Plato creates the Allegory of the Cave to be a conversation between his mentor Socrates and one of his student Glaucon. Plato sets the story to demonstrate that the “blinded” prisoner or in a more cultural sense the men of iron. The Greeks created 4 classes of civilization the gold,silver,bronze and the iron.

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Plato’s Allegory of the Cave was an interpretation of the aversion humans have to things that are outside of their experienced reality, as well as a proposed solution. Firstly, I can’t help but notice that there is a racist, classist, sexist, and ableist element to Plato’s proposal. Allegory of the Cave is found within The Republic, which is a book that describes “the education required of a Philosopher-King”. Racial minorities, poor people, women, and disabled people are all immediately eliminated from the selection of potential candidates.

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Plato’s Republic, Book 7, talks about the metaphor referred to as "the allegory of the cave. " This metaphor in philosophy is use to describe the importance and effect education or lack of education has on the human mind. In book VII, education is referred to as a light that brightens the different paths that exist in life. It helps open the human mind to things that it was unaware of. Another point made in book VII, was that by educating yourself you become less ignorant to what is out there in the world.

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Plato’s The Republic was written roughly around 380BC and yet can often be related to political systems of a country and the way people live today. A majority of the book is spoken through a Greek philosopher, Socrates, whom taught Plato about the life of a philosopher. Socrates was a citizen of Athens and was considered to be an outcast, as many philosophers typically were. He was accused of not believing in the Gods of Athens and corrupting the youth with his teachings. Socrates would eventually be condemned by the council in Athens and sentenced to death around 399BC.

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1) In the allegory of the cave, Plato’s main goal is to illustrate his view of knowledge. A group of prisoners have been chained in a cave their whole lives and all they have ever been exposed to were shadows on the wall and voices of people walking by. The prisoners in the cave represent humans who only pay attention to the physical aspects of the world (sight and sound). Once one of them escapes and sees the blinding light, all he wants is to retreat back to the cave and return to his prior way of living. This shows that Plato believes enlightenment and education are painful, but the pain is necessary for enlightenment and it is worth it.

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“The Allegory of the Cave” exemplifies a path of intellectual transformation that has important parallels to the journey of a hero. Socrates’ description of the Allegory of the Cave represents education and the role of education on the soul. This analogy consists of several stages that highlight the philosopher’s heroic journey. The first stage is an image of cave prisoners who spend their entire lives looking at shadows. The prisoners are “chained not just by their legs but by their necks, so that they can’t move and can only looks ahead of them” (Plato 239).

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Socrates’s allegory of the cave in Plato’s Republic Book VII is an accurate depiction of how people can be blinded by what they are only allowed to see. The allegory does have relevance to our modern world. In fact, all of us as a species are still in the “cave” no matter how intelligent or enlightened we think we have become. In Plato’s Republic Book VII, Socrates depicts the scenario in a cave where there are prisoners who are fixed only being able to look at the shadows on the wall which are projections of things passing between them and the light source.

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3078607 Professor Cheryl King English 1301.81049 24 September 2016 “Allegory” Response “Everything that is seen is not always what is made out of it.” What does that quote mean? Are there people who actually understands this quote and live by it? In Plato’s “Allegory of the Cave,” Socrates explains to Glaucon that life is like being chained up in the cave and having no general knowledge about life. Plato’s Allegory of the Cave portrays a positive message by demonstrating the importance of education.

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The prisoners played a guessing game as to what shadow would appear next and as a reward for being correct would gain praise.

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Kangbo Lu Josh Coito English 122 20 March 2016 Journal #9: “Allegory of the Cave” In Plato’s allegory “The Allegory of the Cave”, he implies that people might born or live in a world of darkness and being unenlightened, and knowledge can enlighten them. Plato develops his ideas by giving an parable of a caveman was being enlightened by the light of outside world and returned to the cave to describe his experience, comparing the people in the real world to the story of the caveman, and explaining why governing is similar to this parable. By using the allegory of the cave with formal diction and educating tone, he exams the reality of our world in order to educate Glaucon that the reality of this world is like the shadow on the world, and the governors of state should be like the enlightened caveman to not only continue attaining knowledge,

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How does the story "The Machine Stops" echo the sentiments of Plato in "The Allegory of the Cave"? "The Machine Stops," The two main characters, Vashti and her son Kuno, live on opposite sides of the world. Vashti is content with her life, which, like most people of that world, she spends producing and endlessly discussing secondhand 'ideas '. Kuno, however, is a sensualist and a rebel. He tells Vashti that he has visited the surface of the Earth without permission, and without the life support apparatus supposedly required to survive in the toxic outer air, and he saw other humans living outside the world of the Machine.

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Searching for the truth is very challenging, as the world today entrenched in lies. Plato’s “Allegory of the Cave” briefly tells a story about cavemen being chained on most parts of their body, restring all movement including their head, since childhood. Then, he discussed the consequences inflicted onto the cavemen, specifically their perspective towards the truth after being chained for a long period of time in the dark cave, which resembles many events occurring in a person’s daily life. Based on the discussed effects, the author argues that human beings should always seek the real meaning of truth.

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Plato discussed a two layer view of what he perceived as reality; the world of becoming and the world of being. The world of becoming is the physical world we perceive through our senses. In the physical world there is always change. The world of being is the world of forms, or ideas. It is absolute, independent, and transcendent.

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Are we always at the mercy of others and our own experiences? Are the truths we cling to always reality? Are we ever truly free or are we always prisoners in our own mind? These are some of the questions that went through my mind while reading Plato’s allegory of the cave. Through them I’ve come to understand one of the biggest themes in this allegory is our ability to “shackle” ourselves mentally, but also our ability to free ourselves if only we have the courage.

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