This is a description of The Allegory of the Cave

1. The Allegory of the
Cave
Plato

2. Plato
 428-348 BCE
 Athens, Greece
 Student of Socrates
 The Republic
--a dialogue on the
nature of justice,
society, and ethics

3. Socrates
 469-399 BCE
 Athens, Greece
 Socratic Method
--seeking insight
by questioning
 Epistemology
--what is knowledge;
how do we know

4. Allegory = an extended metaphor
 Metaphor
--express one
concept in terms
of another
 One story is
analogous to
another

5. The Cave
 Socrates dialogues with one of his
students, Glaucon, and asks him to imagine
a situation:
“And now…let me show in a figure how far
our nature is enlightened or unenlightened”

7. Symbolism
 Sun
 Cave

8. Enlightenment
 Everyone has experienced
a time in which he or she
was seeing things in one
way and then became
enlightened and began see
or understand things in a
new way. Write an essay
about an experience you
had in which you went
from seeing things in one
way to seeing things in
another way.