The Allegory Of The Cave By Jason Rene Castro And Seth David

In The Allegory of the Cave, Socrates and Glaucon are conversing. Socrates asks Glaucon to image a cave, where prisoners are kept and have been kept since their childhood. They are each tied up so they cannot move, not even their necks to look behind them. They are forced to look at the wall in front of them. Behind them are a fire and a walk way behind the fire where people can walk on. The people on the walk way are making shadows of human and animal forms, including others objects as well. The prisoners have no idea that what is behind them is only an illusion. One of the prisoners is released from the chains and the fire blinds his eyes when he turns around. Once they adjust, he notices that the shadows are not real. He is then brought outside and the sun burns his eyes worse than the fire did. The prisoner’s eyes adjust and what he sees is unbelievable to him. He sees outside, the sun, the clouds, the grass, his reflection and so much more. When he returns to tell

Materialistic items play a key role in the world today. People use these items, such as technological appliances, to fulfill their daily wants and needs. However, most people do not realize the negative effects of such a heavy reliance on material goods. In “The Allegory of the Cave,” Plato shares his idea that an overdependence on items can negatively affect ethical decisions. This idea is discussed in “The Veldt,” by Ray Bradbury, The Truman Show, by Peter Weir, and Daniel Key’s novel, Flowers for Algernon. Throughout all three stories, characters greatly rely on items and other people, leading them to make unethical decisions. In some cases, people are objectified as a result of being needed, desired, and treated unfairly. In “The Veldt,” The Truman Show, and Flowers for Algernon, an overreliance on items leads to a loss of focus on morals and what is ethically important.

In Plato’s essay, “Allegory of The Cave” Plato creates a story about three prisoners in a cave, through this he further makes his point that without knowledge our view of the truth is askew. Plato explains that the three hostages have been shackled in the dark cave their whole lives unable to see the real world. The only piece of actuality they can see are shadows of people crossing in front of the opening of the cave. These figures can drive anyone insane without having any real truth to what the images could be. Without any awareness of the real world just outside of the cave they are forced to adapt and therefore accept their own reality. Plato goes on to say that, “the truth would be literally nothing but the shadows of the images” (122). The obscurities are significant because they are the only apprehension the prisoners have, they have nothing to compare it to. The actuality of it to the captives is something other than the truth would be outside of the cave. The forms on the wall are only just shadows, but to them that is everything they have ever known. Plato through his legend portrays

As we know, Socrates chose to never write or have his ideas published. We learned of his outlook and ideas through the writing and dialogues of a student whom admired everything about him, Plato. In the “Allegory of the Cave,” we read a dialogue that occurs between Socrates and another student, Glaucon. Socrates describes chained human beings living in an underground cave, which has a mouth open towards the light. Due to being chained, these people cannot see the light of day, nor can they see anything that is not directly in front of them. There is a fire burning behind them, which casts a shadow on the wall they are facing. “To them, I said, the truth would be literally nothing but the shadows of the images” (Plato, 3). Because the shadows are all they see, they are all that is real to them. If one of these prisoners were to be freed to the world above, their neck would be stiff, the light would shock their eyes and they would no longer be able to see the realities they once saw in the shadows. Once the person adjusts to the light, they will be able to understand that the sun is the cause of everything

Each portion of the allegory symbolizes something key in Plato's philosophy. The cave represents the world we live in. Determined by empirical evidence of the senses with disregard to the obvious limitations he sees. The physical presence of the cave is meant to parallel the physical presence of our surroundings. The shadows that are cast on the wall by people passing by have a slightly different meaning. They are meant to be our perception of empirical evidence as knowledge. While empirical evidence can lead to reasoning of knowledge, Plato believes relying on the physical evidence alone is not enough to have sound knowledge of anything. While living in the cave the prisoners often played a guessing game to pass the time. The winners of the game were often praised as being clever masters of nature. To a reader this seems absurd because the shadows are occurring completely by chance independent of anything happening in the cave. Plato uses the game to mock masters of empirical knowledge. Science thinks it understands the physical world, the comparison to the sciences to the game is meant to show us how truly little we can know about the planet through experimentation. Scientists will always assert they can never prove anything, simply show probable clause. The game capitalizes on that inability of proof to

Plato's Allegory of the Cave is also termed as the Analogy of the Cave, Plato's Cave, or the Parable of the Cave. It was used by the Greek philosopher Plato in his work The Republic to illustrate "our nature in its education and want of education". It comprises of a fictional dialogue between Plato's teacher Socrates and Plato's brother Glaucon. Socrates gives a description of a group of people who spent their lifetime facing a blank wall chained to the wall of a cave. These people saw and tried to assign forms of the shadows projected on the wall by things passing in front of a fire behind them. These shadows as put by Socrates, are what the prisoners can view close to reality (Law 2003). He further compares a philosopher to the prisoner who is freed from the cave and comprehends that he can envision the true form of reality instead of the shadows which the prisoners saw in the cave and these shadows do not depict reality at all.

The allegory of the cave story is about a group of prisoners living in caves and their necks trapped by chains. They cannot turn around, and the fire behind them. Because they already accustomed to the surroundings which is really dark. So they naturally think that the shadow is the real things. Later, one of the prisoners was be released. He turned and walked out of the cave, and gradually adapt to the sunshine. Here, the sun is the symbol of truth/justice. He realized other prisoners may not know the cave of life is an illusion, and the shadow on the wall is not the real things. So he back to the cave and told it to his friends. However, these prisoners didn’t believe him, and laugh at him, even want to

There are men chained to one side of a cave and a fire behind them, casting shadows along the wall that they are facing. If men were to walk with objects behind the chained men they would only see the shadow of the object and assume that that was what the objects looked like. However, if one of the men was to be dragged out of the cave and actually seen the object in the real world, it would look much different. The man who had stepped out of the cave would be much more educated then the man inside and would see justice firsthand. To be "good", as Socrates puts it he will need to go back in an educate the others, to achieve the same knowledge that he has. In comparison to the real world, the trip out of the cave is the mind. My interpretation of the allegory is that Socrates is suggesting that him and his followers are the only ones who have dared to venture out of the cave and enlighten their minds with new ideas. Once they embark back into the cave however to bring back their new ideas they are not warmly welcomed. Plato says, "Wouldn 't they say of him that by going up above was neither prudent nor advisable? And if they could free their hands to seize and kill the man who had released and led one of them up, wouldn 't they kill him."(12). In other words, the men inside the cave felt threatened by the man who was bringing men above the cave and wanted to get rid of him, just like Athens wanted to dispose of

Prisoners live in a deep cave, represented as "underground den", where they have never experienced sunlight before,because they have been there since they were born. They are not able to do any movement, since their necks and legs are tied by chaine. They are only able to look in front of them and look at shadows, that is caused by the fire behind them. Since the prisoners have not experienced anything besides the shadows ahead of them, they can only work with that knowledge what they have got. They consider their shadows to be real. In Socrates's story all the people, who live in the cave, think that knowledge is something that based on experience, and not on ideas. In this story the prisoners (who live in this closed world) represent those people, who have limited, slim knowledge about what's going on in the World and they are their own prisoners.

A group of people who lived in the cave in the cave all their lives facing the wall. People observe the shadows on the wall of things that pass before the fire behind them and begin to attribute forms to these shadows. According to Socrates, shadows are the closest thing to the reality that prisoners can see. Then he adds that the philosopher is like a prisoner but who is released from the cave and understands that the shadows on the wall are not the reality at all because he is able to perceive the true form of reality instead of the ordinary shadows seen by the prisoners.

“The Allegory of the Cave”, is a kind of theory by Plato. In the story, there are three prisoners, sitting in a cave facing the back wall. They are chained at the neck and cannot turn their heads. Behind them is a fire. Between the fire and the cave wall there is a ridge in which puppets of sorts move along and cast shadows on the wall. None of this can be seen by the prisoners. At the opposite end of the cave, behind them, is the exit which leads up to the outside world. Then, one of the prisoner gets free. It's painful to leave the cave physically as he hasn't moved in years and has never seen real light of the sun, but once he gets used to it, he sees the world for what it really is. Later, he

My reflections this week’s discussion is of Plato’s Allegory of the Cave/Republic. I found this to be an interesting reading and video. Life itself is a long road of learning. Throughout our lives, we perceive things to what we believe or want to believe whether factual or not. We also believe in what we experience bad or good. Sometimes that bad experience can hold us back from moving forward or maybe it is that good experience we believe we don’t need to look any further. Learning is part of life and it is most important. It is what molds us who we are and who we become. If we hold us selves back, we will never truly know what opportunity, knowledge or experience there is to be taken. Sometimes we will be those prisoners that don’t

Socrates attempts with the metaphor of the cave to explain how the prisoners represent the majority of human beings, who are enslaved by their ignorance and are unaware of it. Therefore they remain to cling to their customs and false beliefs as always. These prisoners, like most men, believe that they know and feel happy in their ignorance. Between the prisoners and the light are what Socrates called puppeteers who play the role of making prisoners think an unreal life-based

In “Allegory of the Cave,” Plato illustrates a conversation between Socrates and his student, Glaucon, about prisoners trapped within a cave since childhood with “their legs and necks in bonds so that they are fixed, seeing only in front of them.” The only source of light these prisoners have is “…a fire burning far above and behind them. Between the fire and the prisoners there is a road above, along which see a wall, built like the partitions puppet-handlers set in front of the human beings and over which they show the puppets." However, a twist is presented. If a prisoner managed to get out of their shackles and look into the fire, they would turn back and realize that the images they saw weren’t real at all.

The shadows of Socrates’ cave act as representations of reality for the cave dwellers. They mislead the cave dwellers into thinking that the shadows are reality. The cave dwellers believed that their perception equated to reality, but they never realized that their perception could be