While reading Plato’s Republic recently, I came across his now famous Cave Allegory. I remember this from an old philosophy class I took and after reading it, I found that the philosophy text books and instructor did not do the metaphor justice. There was a lot of contextual information from the entire book, the time period that Plato was in, and the influences on Plato that made reading the metaphor in its original book more informative and interesting to think about. The essence of the metaphor is that there are prisoners at the bottom of the cave and these prisoners can talk to each other, but cannot see each other. The only things they have to look at all their lives are the shadow reflections of items from higher up in … Read entire article »