Explain Plato's Analogy of the Cave Plato was a dualist, he believed there are two worlds, the world of the Forms and the world of Appearances. 'The Analogy of the Cave' portrays humans stuck in a 'world of appearances'. It depicts a cave in which there are prisoners who have been chained up since birth so they can only see in front of them. The prisoners have their back to a curtain, behind the curtain there is a road and further behind that and higher up in the cave is a fire. People walk alond the road carrying various objects such as models of animals on poles.
While in contrast, in Meditation 1 Descartes takes a more introspective approach by analyzing reality with systematic doubt. In his systematic approach, Descartes peals away the layers of his reality purposely doubting both his senses and reasoning imposing on himself the possibility of an unknown world, ultimately concluding that we can have no certain knowledge of reality. In both The Matrix and The Allegory of the Cave the people live in controlled worlds where their reality has been altered by outside influences. In the Matrix, the primary character, Neo, discovers that the world in which he lives is a simulation created by a computer (The Matrix). Neo exists not in the reality that he has experienced but in a giant machine, along with the rest of the human population, where he is attached to a computer that controls all his experiences.
He argued that they were part of the structure of the mind and that we would have no experience without them. He says that sight, smell, touch etc. are all meaningless to us unless they are brought under these innate concepts. Kant believes in a world beyond our conceptual scheme called the noumenal world which he says we can know nothing about and it is impossible to discuss. People have criticized this view by say that how can Kant know that the Noumenal world exists if there is no evidence of it.
human beings living in a underground cave, which has a mouth open towards the light and reaching all along the cave; here they have been from their childhood, and have their legs and necks chained so that they cannot move, and can only see before them, being prevented by the chains from turning round their heads. Above and behind them a fire is blazing at a distance, and between the fire and the prisoners there is a raised way; and you will see, if you look, a low wall built along the way, like the screen which marionette players have in front of them, over which they show the puppets.”(1112). These prisoners have been chained since childhood, and are being asked by their teacher or person who is controlling the puppets to look towards the light. A puppet is a small figure of
“The Caves in Our World” In the story, “The Allegory of the Cave,” there are prisoners chained in a cave who have never seen the outside world, but only distorted views of people and the objects they carry along the wall behind the prisoners. In one sense, the cave could be seen as the darkness that people live in when they do not know Jesus. They live in a dark world, where the fire is Satan, who lies and distorts peoples’ views of things by casting the shadows on the wall. People who do not know Jesus are tempted and lied to by Satan. He makes it near impossible for those people to see the truth spoken by the Bible.
I disagree that Hume's arguments to causation are successful to a full extent due to the fact that Hume's challenges criticise causation from the point of view that empirical evidence is our only source of knowledge, suggesting we cannot know whether the effect due to cause can be discovered because "the effect is different from the cause, and so can never be discovered." Yet why should we apply the limitations of our ability to state that God does not exist? To further evaluate, Hume states we are bound by empirical data and so we will only be able to 'induce' that the regress of cause and effect exists and so this regress falls foul to Hume's Fork. The criticism of Hume's challenge is formulated in the sense that because philosophically and empirically "we will never know the true origins of the universe" it does not mean that "the universe is the "brute fact" as stated by B. Russell. A second challenge of Hume is that we are able to possibly imagine that something can cause itself into existence.
The prisoners entertain themselves by naming the shapes as they pass through their view in a form of a predictive game. The shadows cast on the back of the cave wall by the carriers of statues is the only reality the prisoners are aware of. Socrates suggests the images are the extent of the interaction and stimulation they receive during their entire life, with the exception of one
He is only worried about the attainable future and ideals, while Plato is more focused about the enlightenment of man, and the understanding of knowledge. Machiavelli would indeed react poorly to Plato’s ideas in “The Allegory of the Cave” and would reject his “utopian” vision in favor of his own more “realist” vision. Plato, on the other hand would reject Machiavelli's viewpoints just as
However St. Thomas Aquinas believed it is illogical to think that their wasn’t an uncaused first cause when we look at the creation of the universe as it is ludicrous to believe it is a never ending sequence of events. We can tell this as St. Thomas Aquinas said “In the world some things are in motion. Now whatever is moved is moved by another. But this cannot go on infinitely (rejecting infinite regress)…. Therefore it is necessary to arrive at a first mover, moved by no other, and this everyone
Socrates uses a rather elaborate argument to show this definition is also insufficient. If the gods approve of something because it is holy, their approval cannot be what makes it holy, he says. If an act is holy because the gods approve of it, we still do not know what makes it holy or why the gods approve. It seems that any attempt to define holiness by the will or approval of the gods is bound to fail. Even in contemporary society, we tend to associate morality with some kind of divine will, but through the Euthyphro, Socrates seems to suggesting we think along another line altogether.