Plato is Greek philosophers and he was the student of Socrates and the teacher of Aristotle. His thinking and reasoning were well beyond that of his time. Plato is most well-known for his theory on forms. Plato’s Theory of Knowledge behind his example of the cave and divided line fascinating. There are three main examples of Plato’s theory of knowledge. His allegory of The Cave his metaphor of the Divided Line and with some extra help from his theory on Forms. Each theory is intertwined and are the best examples to represent Plato’s own view on what knowledge really is, even though they are unique in their own way by opening up new and different ideas.
In Plato theory of the cave, Plato a scene of prisoners seated in a dark cave facing a wall from birth; the prisoners have never seen anything except shadows. If the prisoners could turn around, they would see puppeteers with props and a fire behind that. In the example, the puppeteers are using the fire to produce shadows on the wall for the captive prisoners. Plato states that to them, reality is just a shadow thrown onto the wall, because that is all they have ever and will ever know. Another vision was about a prisoner being released, describes how his movements would suffer, his eyes would suffer, and his body would suffer not only emotionally but physically. All the evidence I gather from “the cave” makes it seem like Plato thought most of humanity was living in a cave, in the dark and very limited in knowledge being bound to bare minimum, and that with new knowledge and to gain this new information is basically humanity being rescued from darkness. He put it this way, “the conversion of the soul, in the readiest way; not to put the power of sight into the soul’s eye, which already has it, but to ensure that, instead of looking in the wrong direction, it is turned the way it ought to be.”(Plato Republic book X) To Plato the rest of humanity was basically these tied up people. Gaining true knowledge to common people would be the same as letting one man out of the cave, potentially dangerous and also freeing at the same time.
In Plato The Divided Line visualizes the levels of knowledge in a more systematic way. Plato states there are four stages of knowledge development: Imagining, Belief, Thinking, and Perfect Intelligence. Imagining is at the lowest level of this developmental ladder. Imagining, here in Plato’s world, is not taken at its conventional level but of appearances seen as “true reality”. Plato considered shadows, art and poetry, especially rhetoric, deceptive illusions, what you see is not necessarily what you get. With poetry and rhetoric, you may be able to read the words, but you may not understand the “real” meaning. For example, take, again, the shadow. If you know a shadow is something “real” then you are beyond the state of imagination which implies that a person is unaware of observation and amounts to illusion and ignorance.
127 our experts are availableright now
In Conclusion Plato had many knowledge of philosophy and he was a student of Socrates and after Socrates death Plato started his own academy and began to teach people about his theory of Philosophy and Socrates who is the father of Philosophy about his theory and he lived it on even after Socrates death.
