Allegory of the Cave Research Papers
In book seven of Republic Plato gives us his famous allegory of the cave. This allegory is meant to explain the nature of reality and of human knowledge of that reality. Plato asks us to imagine the following. There is a cave. From the time of their childhood human beings are chained and fettered so that they face the back wall of the cave. Their backs are to the entrance of the cave, but they have never seen that entrance. High up behind them there burns a fire. Between the fire and their backs is a low wall. Men carry past this wall, things that rise above the wall, “…human images and shapes of animals as well, wrought in stone and wood and every material…”. The chained prisoners never see these directly, but because of the fire behind them they see the shadows that they cast on the back wall of the cave that they face.
We are, Plato believes, like the prisoners. We do not see reality, but only the shadow of the real. The concrete, material objects perceivable to men are imperfect copies of that which truly is real. Their imperfection is a sign of their inferior status vis a vis reality. Any human attempt to draw a straight line will fail; the attempt is less real than the Form of the straight line that is graspable by the intellect. Everything that man “knows” from his experience of the world through his senses is a shadow of its more real parent Form. Real knowledge cannot be gained of concrete objects because they are, actually, mere shadows. The senses, organs of the body, are fallible. It is the mind, an organ of the soul, that can, through reasoning, apprehend the Forms, and it is only by such an exercise of the mind that knowledge worthy of the name is gained. Annas, speaking of Plato’s views on knowledge as expressed in Meno and Phaedo states, “…our reasoning capacity, identified with the soul, is sharply separated from our empirical means of cognition…The soul, the reasoning ability which grasps reality, is…drastically separated from the body, understood as everything that is not pure reasoning…”. Annas also remarks that this is the model of human knowledge that is on display in the middle chapters of Republic.
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A research paper is an in-depth examination of Allegory of the Cave. More than just an overview of what was learned on Allegory of the Cave, like a term paper is, a research paper contains analysis of Allegory of the Cave along the lines of organizational theory and relevant published material. Research papers are highly analytical and can often be more than 8 to 10 pages. The key to a good research project is the examination of recently published journal articles and peer-reviewed material on the Allegory of the Cave chosen. Like the name implies, research papers are exactly that, a paper that examines the information that can be found on Allegory of the Cave.
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