Hi, I’ve seen a few places mention this lately with the new hype about ‘The Matrix’ but none of them have really mentioned what it is. Is it a book, or a study or what? I know that it involves prisioners in a cave viewing shadows on the wall, but what else am I missing? Is it a book of fiction or a book on philosophy, or what?
Thank you for any help or information you can provide.
Im sure someone else will come in with a more complete summary and a google will certainly give you more than enough information.
Basically, Plato believed that everything we viewed in the world was merely a “shadow” of the ideal version of the object. Thus, a circle we draw on a page is merely a representation of a “perfect” circle. A chair may have bumps and splinters but the “perfect” chair does not. This point of view is now known as the “Platonic” view when applied to mathematics, That is, there is some transcendant order in the world and maths is a way of revealing that order. As opposed to Formalists who think of maths as merely an elaborate game of moving meaningless symbols around while following arbitrary rules.
Anyway, Plato made the analogy of a group of people who chained so that they could only view the wall of a cave. A fire behind them allowed them to see various shadows of objects as they passed by. To those people, the shadows would represent reality whereas they are merely projections of other things.
Shalmanese-Pretty much hit it on the head.
Here’s some links:
Cave 1
A “modern” bear cave story.
Plato’s Cave
Storm’s Nest Cave
Ah, the Theory of Forms. I had to read The Republic in the original Greek for A level. It’s an experience I’d rather not have undergone.
The cave story is in Book VII of Plato’s Republic; near it is the allegory of the divided line, which is a geometric version of the cave.