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Plato's Allegory Of The Cave Essay

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Plato’s Allegory of the Cave signifies political and logical enlightenment, illustrated through four stages. The allegory was posed by Plato to illustrate that seeking knowledge is essential in closing the gap between our own individual subjective realities and what Plato deemed to be absolute truth and understanding. The allegory is an element pulled from The Republic, specifically setting the stage for Plato’s introduction of what constitutes a just state, and Plato’s theory of the tripartite soul and state parallel. The allegory sets the scene of several prisoners who have been chained inside a cave since childhood, behind them fire burns, and a short wall where people are passing behind the wall carrying objects. The prisoners are chained …show more content…

Applying Plato’s Allegory of the Cave, the journalists would be the individuals chained to the cave, using their imagination or intuition to attain what they believe to be truth. For example, one journalist suggests that the body that was found was not Marie Roget as suspected, but some other individual, thus using Gula’s confident speculation: *“All experience has shown that drowned bodies, or bodies thrown into the water immediately after death by violence, require from six to ten days for sufficient decomposition to take place to bring them to the top of the water….It is a doubtful point, also, whether the body would be so soon afloat, even were it thrown in after having been dead two days. And, furthermore, it is exceedingly improbable that any villains who had committed such a murder as is here supposed would have thrown the body in without weight to sink it, when such a precaution could have so easily been taken." It is up to Dupin to parse ‘see through the darkness’ and parse through the journalists’ suggestions to obtain the

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