Will Form 5495 Ethics 2017-2025

So, in this video, I want to review how Plato's allegory the cave is connected to his divided line, the theory of forms, and his philosophy of education, metaphysics, epistemology, and so on. Okay, and remember, though there is no substitute for actually reading Plato's books (he wrote approximately 36 books), in Plato's Republic, that's his masterpiece, Socrates paints one of the most powerful images in the history of philosophy. And this is the allegory of the cave, which can be reduced to four stages. In the first stage, imagine that cave prisoners are chained and looking at a cave wall. They don't know they are chained, they don't know that they're prisoners. They see and hear shadows on the cave wall and they believe them to be real. And these prisoners represent the majority of humankind. So, I'm going to pull up a PowerPoint, and these are a couple of images we have from Plato's cave. You can see they're now in the second stage. Imagine a prisoner who is compelled to break free. Plato uses this word "compelled," so the prisoner is freed from the chains and turns around to see a platform upon which people are carrying objects in front of a fire. In these objects, cast shadows on the cave wall. The prisoner now realizes that the familiar world since birth, right, the familiar world of shadows on the cave wall, is actually an illusion created by people in the background carrying the objects in front of the fire. So, the shadows on the wall, the prisoner now realizes they're less real than the objects in the background casting the shadows, right? So, we're moving from appearance to reality. Even though all his life or her life, he thought the shadows were real, he's just now discovering they're...