PHILOSOPHY: Plato
- Created by: Freddy Prentis
- Created on: 08-04-17 13:27
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- PHILOSOPHY: Plato
- THE ALLEGORY OF THE CAVE (Meaning): Plato presents the allegory of the cave in the Republic to illustrate that experience can only give us DOXA and that EPISTEME can only come through knowledge of the forms.
- THE SYMBOLS OF THE ALLEGORY:
- THE CAVE - The physical world of experiences in which we are born live and die.
- THE PRISONERS - Normal people who experience the world and take what they experience as reality
- THE SHADOWS - Things that we sense in the world through sight, hearing, taste etc
- THE PUPPETS - The FORMS which exists in a temporal world of ideas; they are the ideas that we recognise in the things we experience, e.g. love, truth, beauty etc.
- THE JAGGED PATH - The journey of the philosopher from ignorance to knowledge.
- THE SUN - The essential FORM of goodness which is the highest of all FORMS and is responsible for giving life to all things and through which all FORMS can be known
- SUMMARY - The allegory teaches us that we think we are gaining knowledge from the PHYSICAL world, we are in fact learning nothing but opinion which is constantly changing
- THE SYMBOLS OF THE ALLEGORY:
- Duellist: believed in 2 realms, The realm of forms and the realm we live in
- "Rationalist": Believed the only true way to gain knowledge is through "RATIONAL" thinking
- Strengths
- Democritus: All things can be divided down to invisible blocks ( atoms). They were wrong as science suggests that atoms can be divided as well
- Plato: Helped us understand that reason can get us places that empiricism cant and Aristotle did the opposite
- Heraclitus: Supports Plato's theory of actuality and potentiality with the idea of the world being in a constant state of flux, as this suggests that the world is a shadow of its never changing version of the FORMS
- Parmenides: Also supports Plato's idea of the forms as he says if you take a snapshot of a arrow mid flight it is stationary, unchanging and eternal; this is what the world of the FORMS is like
- Pythagoras: Supports Plato in that he says that some ideas are abstract and exist ethereally and enchantingly. Same was said from Plato that said some things exist eternally and in the realm of the FORMS
- Weaknesses
- Third Man Argument: Essentially this states that if the form of a man is a man then that in turn would need a form
- Extent of the World of Forms: The idea of forms existing eternally and things in the past and future existing there as that would suggest inventions that haven't been made yet. And this would suggests things that are negations of things
- THE ALLEGORY OF THE CAVE (Meaning): Plato presents the allegory of the cave in the Republic to illustrate that experience can only give us DOXA and that EPISTEME can only come through knowledge of the forms.
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