Socrates And Stephen Vincent Benet's 'Allegory Of The Den'

“A person’s a person, no matter how small” (136). The ethics of abortion has been argued emotionally for many years. In The Unaborted Socrates (Inter Varsity Press: Downers Grove, IL, 1983), Peter Kreeft approaches this important debate using fictional characters and a logic based argument. Socrates, the great ethical philosopher who lived in Athens, Greece in about 400 BC, returns in the present day (then 1983) to challenge the pro-Choice position of an abortion doctor, an ethicist and a psychologist. The result is a thoroughly logical and entertaining exposure of flaws in the pro-choice platform. The author organizes the debate of this serious moral issue -- is abortion murder -- by engaging Socrates in three dialogs. In each dialog Socrates questions a pro-choice representative about his beliefs. In each case, Socrates shows his opponent the fallacy of his position using the opponent's own words. Socrates mission is to “follow the common master” (20), using rational thought to follow the argument wherever it leads. The Unaborted Socrates draws the reader into questioning thoughts of all human beings having the right to live, the harm and evil of liberal abortion laws, and being pro-choice or pro-force.

FUTTER, DYLAN. “Socrates Human Wisdom.” Dialogue: Canadian Philosophical Review 52.1 (2013): 61-79. Humanities International Complete. Print.

Imagine yourself sitting inside a dark, damp, cave where the only thing you can see are moving shadows on the cave wall in front of you. You can’t move anywhere or see anything besides the shadows, and these are the only things you’ve seen for your entire life, so these moving dark images are the most real things you’ve ever known. At some point in our childhood we were mentally in this state of darkness, we didn’t know anything about the world or have any complex thoughts. How then, were we brought out of our caves of darkness and misunderstanding? The Allegory of the Cave is a well known section of Plato’s

Socrates points out that this allegory corresponds to the earlier discussion about the good. Hence, it relates to the analogy of the sun and the analogy of the divided line. Socrates describes analogy of the sun as "a child of the good and most similar to it". He begins with saying that there are things which we can see and feel (visible realm) and there is the good itself, something we can only think about (intelligible realm). He continues, saying that eyesight requires light in order for object to be seen. Light comes from the sun, hence, sun gives a possibility for objects to be seen. Socrates compares the relationship between sight and the sun to the intellect and the good. Good gives power to things that are known. So, just as sun enables

To start off with, John travelled into a forbidden area and he started seeing much more then he was supposed to see and that is when he started losing fear. In the story it states, “The north and the west and the south are good hunting ground, but it is forbidden to go east. It is forbidden to go to any of the Dead Places except to search for metal […] These are the rules and the laws; they are well made. It is forbidden

John realizes what he must do, he must find out the truth of the Place of the Gods. None of his people have ever been to the Place of the Gods. They do not know they truth about it, so the knowledge they had been spreading is false. John knew it would be difficult for his people to understand the truth after being taught wrong for so many years.

In 469 B.C. a man by the name of Socrates was born. Socrates was a very wise man that cared about doing the right thing. He believed that the best ways to develop ideas was in the give and take of conversation, and that the best way to educate people was to ask them a series of questions leading in a particular direction (now named “Socrates method). Socrates had been quick to identify the drawbacks of democracy, and he had also been the teacher of two men who in different ways harmed Athens: Alcibiades and Critias. Which made the parents of the children that Socrates had taught very upset and angry. Granting all this, it lead to the Trial of Socrates 399 B.C. During this trial Socrates expressed his view of death by using his question-and-answer method, for which he was famous for and what seemed to have gotten him in trouble. Socrates did not write so we have to depend on on what others wrote, and by doing that we now get to see the diverse ways people read and understand what was written about his speech. My chosen primary source, Socrates View on Death, is important, because it gives one view of Socrates speech while my outside source, Ancient Greece, gives a slightly more in depth view.

In The Republic Book IV, pp. 130e-136d, Socrates sets out to prove that societal justice is analogous to individual justice. In order to substantiate the analogy, Socrates compares the individual and the city. As he previously defined, justice in the city involves the power relationships between the different parts of the city, namely the guardians, the auxiliaries, and the producers.

“Allegory of the Cave”, written by Plato, is story that contrasts the differences between what is real and what is perceived. He opens with Glaucon talking to Socrates. He has Glaucon imagine what it would be like to be chained down in a cave, not able to see anything other than what is in front of him. He tells a story of men that were trapped in a cave and were prisoners to the truth. These prisoners have only seen shadows. But because of their ignorance, these slaves to the cave believe that the shadows are real. The story goes on to say that one of the men has been dragged out of the cave. He is not happy to see the real world, yet upset because he is being taken

Socrates believes that he is an individual who had the potential to accomplish extraordinary feats due to his unique set of traits. He claims, “If they were of any use, Crito, the many would be able to do the greatest evils, and so they would also be able to do the greatest goods, and that would be fine. But as it is they can do neither, since they cannot make a man either wise or foolish” (Crito, 44d). Only certain people have the capacity to complete enormous feats, and those people are not average citizens of the state. Instead, they must have qualities that set them apart from the rest of the population. Furthermore, “it is reputed at least that Socrates is distinguished from the many human beings in some way” (The Apology, 34e).

In Plato’s allegory, a group of men are held as prisoners in an underground chamber. In the chamber there is no light nor happiness. The men are only allowed to look one way and that is forward. For years, their scenery has been a dark wall with shadows from the objects or people that are behind them. They have never experienced the beauty of nature or the warmth of the sun’s rays. What crime have these men committed that forced them to face such a terrible fate? They are used to being in the dark, that when one man is set free he is amazed by what he sees outside of the chamber. The bright light blinds him and once he faces reality, it slaps him right across the face. He feels sorry for the men in the chamber. He feels sorry that they cannot

This also connects to Allegory of the cave. The people believed in one thing their whole life, then when they were told differently, they didn't want to accept it because it would mean that the world that they had believed in their entire life was't the truth. But no matter what they believed and wanted to be true, it didn't make what was actually true any less true. Which is just like These two stories. No matter how bad they didn't want to accept the truth and just keep living like everything was perfect, it didn't change the truth or make their perception on things any more

Read the following in Plato's The Last Days of Socrates: Phaedo Wisdom and the Soul

Unlike many other disciplines and ways of studying the world, the philosophical approach can vary from person to person and take many shapes, without restricting itself to one specific method at all time. That quality alone has given enormous freedom and variation to the work of many great philosophers, even on the subject of philosophy. To this end, we now turn our attention to Socrates and Voltaire, two of the great philosophers and their concerns and though on philosophy.

Within this story there are prisoners within a cave and puppeteers in control of them construct the prisoners’ realities thus giving them a false mindset. Afterwards, their minds begin to respond to the external stimuli and create from its imaginative forces a separate falsified consciousness: “By every measure, then, reality for the prisoners would be nothing but shadows cast by artifacts” (Plato, 210). The prisoners’ minds create what they undoubtedly believe to be real, yet this poses as a problem when they are actually exposed to the real world outside the cave. They become dissatisfied with the outside world and return to their unreal past lifestyle. Their brain creates the problem for them and they have no escape unless they force themselves to accept the world outside of the cave. Though that is only if their brain is willing to deal with the harshness of the sudden change. Ultimately, The Allegory of the Cave poses as a very accurate representation of the power our brain has to create problems and solve them. It is a fundamental philosophy that almost all beliefs can be traced back to so it is not surprising that there are striking similarities in terms of the plethora of positive and negative effects the mind can