Plato uses allegories beautifully, and one of my other favorites appears in The Republic as “The Allegory of the Cave.” Plato originally used it to help illustrate his understanding of how the perfect concepts in the Realm of Pure Forms appear imperfectly in human minds. In his usage, the light of a bonfire partially illuminates a cavern. Inside the cave, people are chained in such […]
Illusory Forms
In his desire to come up with objective definitions of concepts such as “justice”, “virtue” and “beauty,” Plato (as Socrates before him) struggled with the reality that the definitions of those terms seemed, at least on the surface, to vary a lot from one culture to the next – and even from one individual to the next. That seemed to loan the expedient ethics of […]
An Imperfect Genius
Socrates may have resisted the title of “teacher,” but he nonetheless had students, and the best and brightest of them made such profound contributions to Western philosophy that, arguably, every work written since his day has amounted to a series of critiques and rebuttals of Plato. Unlike Socrates, Plato (a nickname that meant “broad,” given to him by his wrestling instructor because of his strong, […]
The Gadfly
At last, we come to one of the most pivotal thinkers in the history of Western Civilization; a man who, ironically, claimed vast ignorance of just about everything, and who spent his time ostensibly asking questions of other people to try to learn what might actually qualify as truth. We don’t actually know all that much about Socrates, the son of the stonemason Sophroniscus and […]