Explain Plato’s analogy of the cave [25] Plato’s analogy of the cave describes some people who are prisoners and they are only able to see one wall of the cave. Behind them was a lit fire which gave light to be able to cast shadows onto the wall that the prisoners were facing. These shadows were cast by puppeteers who were behind a wall and held things up to tell stories to the prisoners via the wall. One prisoner is forced out of the cave, where he has been his whole life, to see the ‘real’ world. He finds out, after adjusting to the new sunlight, that the shadows were just representations of real objects and that the shadows he had believed to be real objects were in fact not.
A group of people have lived in a deep cave since birth, never seeing the light of day. These people are bound so that they cannot look to either side or behind them, but only straight ahead. Behind them is a fire, and behind the fire is a partial wall. On top of the wall are various statues, which are manipulated by another group of people, lying out of sight behind the partial wall. Because of the fire, the statues cast shadows across the wall that the prisoners are facing.
Behind the prisoners was a large fire and between the fire and prisoners was a walkway. The fire cast shadows upon the wall and the prisoners believed the shadows to be reality. The walkway allowed people to walk through the cave with great ease. As the people crossed through the cave, past the fire, an illusion was created; the fire cast shadows onto the wall that the prisoners were watching. The prisoners spent their lives debating what the shadows were as they couldn’t see the walkway and had no knowledge that this existed.
Socrates was brought in front of jury by a man named Meletus. This man accused Socrates of two violations of Athenian law, creating new gods not recognized by Athenians and corrupting the youth. In The Apology, which was actually not an apology at all, Socrates makes good arguments, but it wasn't about that; it was about the community's belief. Because he is teaching about and creating
The memory of the World of Forms is lost in the trauma of birth and the physical demands of the body. Plato uses the cave to represent the world of sense experience and the area outside of the cave is the World of Forms and transcendental ideals. He shackles his prisoners in the same way the soul is shackled by the body and the trauma of birth. Therefore Plato believed that after transmigration the soul forgets everything that it learnt in the World of Forms, thus learning is remembering. The prisoner who escapes is a philosopher, a seeker of Truth, whose journey out of the cave is a
To him objects in this world are not eternal, and so the beliefs about objects cannot always be correct and cannot always have truth. Now according to Aristotle, he took great issue with Plato’s theory of forms. He says that Plato’s talk of participating is metaphorical and meaningless, and he says that Plato was mistaken in that the form circularity, the reverse doesn’t hold true. He believed that the reverse does in deed hold true, and that if there were not individual circular things, there would be no such thing was the form circularity. Aristotle’s views are that forms are universal, something that more than one individual can be.
Infinite regress is rejected by this argument, it argues that there has to be a first cause, and explanation for the existence of the universe. One main feauture of the cosmological argument is the argument of motion. St. Thomas Aquinas studied the work of Aristotle (a Greek philosopher) and from this he concluded that objects are put in motion by another object or force, for example a series of dominos will knock eachother over if one falls, but the first domino has to be knocked over for this to occur, and this could be a humans influence pushing the first domino over for example. This human would therefore be the first mover of the sequence. However St. Thomas Aquinas believed it is illogical to think that their wasn’t an uncaused first cause when we look at the creation of the universe as it is ludicrous to believe it is a never ending sequence of events.
Behind them, out of their view is a walkway on which people walk across holding objects above them. Behind this walkway there is a fire which then produces light, which shines onto the objects and produces shadows on the wall that the prisoners are facing. These prisoners have never been into the outside world and the only things that they see, other than each other, are the shadows on the wall. Within the analogy Plato explains that one prisoner is dragged out of the cave, blinded by the light and then realises that the cave was not all there is in the world. They see different surroundings and actual objects, not just shadows and of course they are stunned.
Socrates and Aristotle's doctrines contrast in the concepts of reality, knowledge at birth, and the mechanism to find the truth. First, Socrates' concept of reality contrasts with Aristotle's concept. Socrates' theory of ideal forms claims that a perfect world exists beyond the world around us. Our world contains forms imperfectly copied from the ideal forms in the world beyond. In contrast, Aristotle's theory of the natural world states that our world is reality.
Plato begins his analogy with a cave; the cave is said to represent the empirical world that we see and hear around us. Inside this cave there are prisoners who are facing a wall; these prisoners have been underground since they can remember and are chained into position by their necks and ankles. The prisoners are unable to look anywhere but at a wall. However behind the prisoners there is a fire, when the guards walk by the fire they carry statues on their head. The statues infront of the fire cause a shadow to be reflected onto the wall for the prisoners to observes.