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account of Plato s allegory of the cave and what he intended to teach by it
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Plato was aware of his audience, and appreciated the importance of explaining often-difficult concepts in a way that could be more readily understood. To explain his theory of the Forms, Plato used the now well-known Allegory of the Cave.
There are a group of prisoners at the bottom of a cave, shackled so that they can only look straight ahead, they cannot even turn their heads, and they have been like this since they were young children. ... All the prisoners can see is the shadow which is cast by these artificial objects upon the wall of the cave, the sound they hear is just echoes. ... Having grown used to the light outside when the prisoner went back into the cave to tell the others he would fumble in the darkness and look a fool, at best they would laugh at him, at worst they would threaten to kill him if he questioned their cherished beliefs. Yet the released prisoner, knowing this, still has a duty to return to the cave and attempt to convince his colleagues that they live a life of wasted illusions.
Plato was influenced by Socrates, and Plato’s audience would have realised that the released prisoner represents Socrates himself: the man who had no concern for the conventions of his time, who questioned their values and who, ultimately paid the price for such questioning with his life. ...
Certain parts of the analogy represent certain things for example the Cave is the world we live in, it represents our sense experience, or the physical world around us, we think it is reality when in fact it is only a reflection of reality, we are trapped by our senses and reality lies beyond our world of sense, this is represented by the outside of the cave which is the real world although invisible to most can only be seen by the enlightened few who can escape from the cave into the world of reality.
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Paper Information
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Title: account of Plato s allegory of the cave and what he intended to teach by it
Words: 1229
Rating: None
Pages: 4.9
submitted by: Jenny03
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