Plato Vs Greek

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There is a great physical distance that separates Greece from China. The first dated exchange between the two took place with the inauguration of the Silk Road. However, many great philosophers and thinkers from both countries were contemporaries1, such philosophers were addressing the same questions. We can only speculate about the reasons behind the similarities between their moral philosophies and assume that they are strongly linked to each other due to their similar historic contexts such as the devaluation of traditional morals.

Both arguments provide models that refer to an absolute principle on everything that exists. In The Republic, Plato states his definition of what he refers to as the idea of the Good (ἡ τοῦ ἀγαθοῦ ἰδέα)2. On the other hand, Lao Tzu provides the concept of Tao (dào)3.

The main purpose of this paper is to analyze these two concepts under the light of their respective historical contexts, which were characterized by a devaluation of moral values and …show more content…

Plato’s Republic transmits the Platonic-Socratic vision of how human kind interpret reality. This model concludes with The Allegory of the Cave. Said metaphor describes a cave inhabited by chained men that can only look forward, to the wall of the cave. The wall offers visual projections of things, shadows, and they believe them to be the real things and the essence of the world. One day, one of them sets himself free and gets to see the real models behind the shadows he once thought to be real things. When he comes back and talks about the real world he experienced, he is mocked by the other men and thought to be insane. With this representation, Plato refers to human knowledge: The things that we see are not the authentic forms of the world, but merely projections of real things that are outside of our human

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