Allegory Of The Cave Analysis

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When we study the nature of epistemology and what it hopes to grant us through the investigation of it, it is hard, if not altogether impossible to avoid reading Plato’s Meno. In it, Plato uses the characterized forms of his teacher, Socrates, and Meno, a reputable but ignorant follower of Gorgias to create a dialogue heavily reliant on Socrates’ teaching proficiencies to help Meno comprehend the questions he is asking, or rather, the questions he should be asking. Meno begins by asking Plato whether virtue can be taught (70a, 354). It is soon clear that not only does neither man have a solid definition of virtue, but Meno ultimately doesn’t understand how someone can be taught to begin with. It is in his sudden confusion that he asks Plato …show more content…

Sure, Plato does say that the soul’s knowledge must be recollected and is not inherently present, but then, can we know anything other than what the soul knows? By this I mean: If the soul knows everything and all truths, and yet a human can know something as the truth that is not the truth, how is this possible? I’m not wholly sure if this observation has any weight to it, but I believe it worth …show more content…

These two terms will come to help Grene rationalize her previous statement: “First, a negative point. If we insist that all cognitive acts are wholly explicit, that we can know only what is plainly, or even verbally, at the centre of our attention, then indeed, we can not escape the puzzlement of Meno’s question” (23), and they will teach us two different categories of knowledge, as Polanyi has divided and titled them respectfully: “knowledge by attending to” and “knowledge by relying on”. By separating them, he is arguing that no knowledge can be wholly focal, so it can only be true that the subsidiary awareness must always contribute to the process of knowing or having knowledge, meaning that nothing is truly objective, but everything is subjective. Obviously, he and Grene are here arguing against Plato’s goal of creating knowledge as something that can only be achieved if one is truly and utterly objective because, frankly, if we are to accept this idea of knowledge as true, then it must be impossible for humans to ‘know’ anything at all. We do not, after all, live in Plato’s

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