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Allegory Of The Cave

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Essential question: What does Plato’s Allegory of the Cave reveal about his and Socrates’ ideas regarding knowledge in society? What do these ideas reveal about Plato’s and Socrates’ attitudes towards themselves and others?

Plato’s Allegory of the Cave appears in the author’s extended work, Republic. The brief Book VII discusses three shackled prisoners who represent the condition into which Plato and Socrates believe all humans are born, and the escapee personifies those curious and bold philosophers who dare to look at the world in new ways.
The Allegory of the Cave illustrates Plato’s and Socrates’ belief that the onerous processes of obtaining, possessing, and sharing knowledge are reserved for the robust and wise members of society: philosophers who possess the strength and motivation to bear the burden associated with truth. The three prisoners in chains know their world only through small reflections from the outside because they have never “seen anything of themselves and one another other than the shadows cast by the fire on the side of the …show more content…

Familiarity with Luce Irigaray’s Speculum of the Other Woman raises an interesting sentiment about Plato’s and Socrates’ ideas of the allegorical cave and women. The introduction of the Allegory of the Cave features a comprehensive description of the space that the three prisoners are confined to, in which Plato writes “[t]hey are in it from childhood with their legs and necks in bonds so that they are fixed, seeing only what is in front of

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