Plato's Allegory Of The Cave By Plato

In Plato's “Allegory Of The Cave” he expresses that people are innately born with abilities like thinking and communicating, but their individual outlook on life is relative to their experiences in life; their educational awareness. Like the men chained in the “cave”, restricted to see only shadows of images cast by fire light and muffled echo sounds of voices; if one is restricted from experiencing new things, places or ideas, then in life their reality is limited to only the experiences they have had. The shadows the prisoners see on the wall are their reality not the actual objects that made the images. As our text “”Think” buy Judith A. Boss indicates, experience and facts we receive from additional resources is the basic level of thinking. Without continued facts and experiences, without education, our thinking is limited to our narrowed reality (shadows).

The Allegory of the Cave, also know as The Analogy of the Cave, Plato's Cave or Parable of the Cave is presented by the Greek philosopher Plato in his work “The Republic “ as a theory concerning the perceptions of human kind and compares the effects of education to the lack of education on our observations. The passage is written as dialogue between Plato’s brother Glaucon and his teacher Socrates.

In the ‘The Allegory of the Cave’, Plato uses a philosophical situation to help us as the reader to examine our perception of life by what is around us. Plato uses such an abstract situation to show that we can mistake the information that we gain due to our position in a situation for truth.

In their work, Plato and Paulo Freire have offered harsh critiques of education and learning. Plato compares people to prisoners in a cave of darkness in relation to knowledge, and Freire refers to a “Banking Concept” of education in which teachers put their thoughts and information into students’ minds much like money is deposited into a bank. Instead of this money being of value, Freire and Plato acknowledge that the value declines. Although many people refute the concept of accepting new knowledge and admission of mistakes, I claim that both Plato and Freire produce valid points about the corruption of education because people cannot learn unless they have an open mind and truly desire to learn. Ultimately, what is at stake here is the effectiveness of learning and continuing the cycle of education.

In Plato’s, Allegory of the cave, a key theory I found was the importance of education. Plato uses an “allegory to illustrate the dilemma facing the psyche in the ascent to knowledge of the imperishable and unchanging forms” (104) Based on my research of the republic, the allegory can reveal multiple hidden messages. Plato describes, ordinary mortals are chained within an underground chamber, which according to Fiero, represents the psyche imprisoned within the human body. These mortals can’t look sideways only straight ahead. They also can’t leave the cave and are facing a cave wall that they can see shadows from a fire of what they imagine are men. These mortals have been in this cave since childhood, which makes them believe the shadows themselves are the men, not a reflection of an actual man. Again, according to Fiero, the light, represents true knowledge, and the shadows on the walls of the cave represent the imperfect and perishable imitations of the forms that occupy the world of the senses.

Plato 's dialogue Meno touches on many important questions of virtue and the ability to teach someone to be good. Arguably one of the most interesting of these questions concerns the nature of learning itself, as Socrates and Meno discuss the relationship between knowledge and true opinion. Socrates concludes by not only defining knowledge and true opinion as separate entities, but also by placing knowledge as the higher of the two in value. He makes this value judgment by pointing to knowledge 's status as opinion that is substantiated with reasoning and truths, arguing this makes knowledge concrete and unwavering. However, due to the notion of change as the central tenant in the search of scientific knowledge, I am inclined to disagree with this static description.

In Plato 's "The Allegory of the Cave," Socrates tells an allegory of the hardship of understanding reality. Using metaphors Socrates compares a prisoner in an underground cave who is exploring a new strange world he never knew of to people who are trying to find a position of knowledge in reality. Through it, Plato attempts to map a man 's journey through education and describes what is needed to achieve a perfect society. According to Socrates, most people tend to rely on their senses excessively and accept the world as it is appears to them in their vision as truth. So that we can liberate our souls from this mental prison, Socrates suggests that we should go through a stage that prepares ourselves for the real world and at the same

Plato 1. Republic Book II a. Education involves physically exercising the body and exposing the mind to cultural studies. 1. The act of educating people’s minds can be completed by sharing stories and studying literature. 2.

Knowledge is said that can be taught by someone who has certainly more understanding and experience than someone else. According to Plato, in the case of the cave, between the prisoner and the instructor, knowledge can’t be transmitted. Every person has different experiences and points of view that would distort the interpretation, thus, having different meanings. Instead, the best way is by directing, meaning that the role of the instructor is to guide its students to what is relevant and important in life, which will allow the student to learn independently. Walking towards the light which can also be perceived as knowledge, is the main need in order to reach self-actualization. “Last of all he will be able to see the sun, and not mere reflections of him in the water, but he will see him in his own proper place, and not in

In Socrates’ mind education is not simply an information exchange; rather it is a painful experience, since all that one had previously believed is typically wrong. This painful experience can be seen as the “philosopher” turns around and stares into the light and eventually learning that everything he had experienced in life were just shadows.

The general concept of education is for students to learn from their teachers. Students grasp ideas and info from their teachers in order to increase their knowledge. Students take knowledge from their teachers & try to memorize them so that they can increase their knowledge. In the excerpts, “Allegory of the Cave,” and Paulo Freire's “The Banking Concept of Education,” both philosophers believe in freedom in learning. In the article, “Is Google Making us Stupid?”, Nicholas Carr states that when people have their freedom with their education with technology, it can result to a disadvantage.

Plato believed that our source of knowledge is an innate idea. Plato states that before we were born we lived in a perfect universe, and everything in that universe was perfect. In his play Meno, Plato illustrates this idea by telling the story of the slave boy. In the play, Socrates asks the boy to draw a square that is double in size. After trial and error, the boy is able to draw the square. There is a dialog between Socrates and Meno, where Socrates questions Meno on where the boy could have obtained that kind of knowledge. Socrates tells Meno that the boy has had no formal schooling, but still knows how to make the square bigger. Socrates concludes that it must be because the slave boy lives in a perfect universe before being born.

Book VII contains the famous allegory of the Cave which illustrates the effects of education on the soul (514 a). Through the allegory and the dialogue it prompts, Socrates makes it clear that the aim of education is to teach the soul to be influenced by good desires and use reason to govern impure desires. This is important because it shows how truth in education can allow a man to be virtuous and just.

Is it possible to rip off the shackles that are bound to you? In Plato’s “The Allegory of The Cave” there are prisoners that are shackled to the ground, and one manages to get freed by a mysterious figure. Why did this figure free this one person and not the rest? Could this figure be something else other than human? Are the Prisoners actually tied down? So many questions could be rung from this story, guess we’ll have to find out.

The “Allegory of the Cave” by Plato represents the differences in the way we perceive reality and what we believe is real. In his story, Plato starts by saying that in a cave, there are prisoners chained down and are forced to look at a wall. The prisoners are unable to turn their heads to see what is going on behind them and are completely bound to the floor. Behind the prisoners, puppeteers hide and cast shadows on the wall in line with the prisoners’ sight, thus giving the prisoners their only sense of reality. What happens in the passage is not told from the prisoners’ point of view but is actually a conversation held between Socrates and Glaucon (Plato’s brother).