plato's allegory of the cave

plato's allegory of the cave

Plato’s Allegory of the Cave
Plato’s allegory of the cave served as a means of portraying two critical aspects of his philosophy with one rather complicated scene. He manages to merge the theories of the natural philosophers and the sophists with unbelievable harmony. This paper will first depict the cave, as explained by Plato. Then I will discuss how he incorporates the theories of the natural philosophers into this analogy.
Plato’s cave analogy is as follows. A group of men are chained to a wall at the bottom of a cave. They are being forced to look at a wall on which there are constantly shadows being cast. They cannot see this, but the shadows are being made from a fire which is shedding light on a series of objects perched behind the prisoners. At the top of the cave there is an exit, outside of which is the sun, which represents Plato’s The Good. Thus all the men in the cave know are the shadows; however, if they broke free they would realize that there is much more to life, the objects themselves. Furthermore, if they can actually oust themselves from the cave they will be illuminated by the light of the Good. Outside of this cave exists the World of Forms, in which the perfect Forms of all things reside. Plato uses these forms as a response to the natural philosophers, and their search explanation of how the world works, and he uses the shackles and the means of breaking them as an image of his refutation of the Sophist beliefs.
The purpose for the philosophy of those aptly named the natural philosophers was to explain how the world around us worked. Parmenides argued that the nature of everything is that nothing can change. Things simply are or are not they cannot switch whatsoever. On the contrary, Heraclitus argued that everything is in a constant state of flux; that is, nothing is static and everything is changing. As a mediator, Empedocles said that in some respects each is right. But how can both be right as they are polar opposite views....