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Essay / Research Paper Abstract
This is a 3 page paper that provides an overview of Plato's allegory of the cave from "The Republic". It shows how the allegory is linked both to rationalism and Christian thought. Bibliography lists 2 sources.
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3 pages (~225 words per page)
File: MH11_KWplato1.rtf
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Unformatted sample text from the term paper:
that knowledge is acquired and what it means to "know" a thing. To convey his concept, Plato utilized the tools of allegory and analogy, much as he did in his
famous Dialogues, to present the "allegory of the cave", a famous section of the Republic which serves as a founding document of rationalism and would greatly influence Christian thought. The
allegory of the cave comes late in the Republic and consists of a dialogue between Socrates, the teacher of Plato, and Platos own brother Glaucon. Socrates asks Glaucon to imagine
a scenario in which a society of men are chained up in a cave with their heads locked in a fixed position, unable to look at anything but the wall
in front of them. Far behind them, a fire burns, and the things which move in front of this fire cast shadows onto the wall that the prisoners face. Because
they cannot see the forms passing before the fire, the men instead take the shadows to be reality itself. Socrates states, "...they see only their own shadows, or the shadows
of one another, which the fire throws on the opposite wall of the cave... To them, I said, the truth would be literally nothing but the shadows of the images"
(Plato, 1969. p. 409). He then likens the philosopher to a prisoner who was able to escape the cave and gradually come to know the true forms of reality. Platos
intent in relating this allegory is to provide a demonstrative example of the idea of rationalism, or the belief that reality must be intuited through the process of reason rather
than sensory information (which, as the allegory demonstrates, may be unreliable). More importantly, however, is how the rationalism evident in this cave allegory relates to Platos "Theory of Forms", a
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