Socratic Ignorance In Plato's Allegory Of The Cave

1. Socratic Ignorance is where a person indirectly admits that don’t know the answer to what they don’t know. In other words they know they that they don’t know everything. Euthyphro is a good example of socratic ignorance because Euthyphro claims that he knows what is holy and what is not considering that he is charging his father for the crime of killing a murderer. So Socrates asks him to define what is holy and what is not. Euthyphro’s first attempt to is to try and explain that charging individuals that have committed religious crimes or offenses can be an example of holiness. However, Socrates doesn’t find this to be a compelling answer and goes on to list other actions that can be considered holy. Euthyphro then tries to explain that

"Allegory of the Cave" is about how prisoners have their legs and necks chained so that they can 't move or look around and are in a cave. They are forced to face a wall with a fire burning behind them so that they can only see the shadows of objects that pass by the fire. This also means that they can only guess what see from the shadow passing by. Eventually one of the prisoners escapes and gets to see the what the world actually looks like and that it would contradict what the prisoner has seen their whole life. If the prisoner were to look at the fire and be told that what they were looking at was the real thing they wouldn’t believe it and would go back the world that they were used to seeing. Then it talks about the prisoner being dragged out of the cave by force until they are out of the cave and are see the light from the sun. The prisoner would be angry and in pain at first because they aren’t used the sun’s light and that they were taken out of the only place they knew. However, as their eyes begin to adjust they can only see shadows, but eventually they can see objects, reflections of people and things that are in water clearly. With the passage of time they come to understand what they are seeing is the real world. Afterwards, the prisoner returns to the cave so that they can share what they’ve experienced with the other prisoners, but they are blinded because their eyes have adjusted to the sunlight. As a result the other prisoners would believe that the

Philosophy is about seeking knowledge and the truth and this story shows that people who have been chained their entire life only know about the cave and nothing else in the world. However, when one of the prisoners escapes, he sees that the world isn’t what he always thought it was. At first the prisoner wasn’t happy about leaving the cave, but eventually he comes to accept that what he sees is the truth. He then returns to the cave to tell the other prisoners about what he saw, but they don’t believe him and that what he saw harmed him. This story symbolizes what happens when people are restrained from seeing certain things because it causes them to have a different perception of the world that can be far from the truth. That is why the Allegory of the Cave is an example of what philosophy is