Plato, Republic Book 7 - The Allegory Of The Cave - Sadler's Lectures

This lecture discusses key ideas from the ancient philosopher Plato's work, The Republic, in particular book 7.

Specifically it examines his famous Allegory of the Cave set out early in book 7. In this allegory, prisoners are confined within an underground dwelling, and believe that reality is the images and sounds projected in front of them. One of the prisoners is freed of his chains and brought up into the sunlit world above. After habituation, he becomes able to fully use his power of sight to see real things, the heavens, and the sun that illuminates them.

The allegory is a story about what genuine education would be. Plato rejects the notion of education as simply providing information or filling students' heads with knowledge. Instead, education involves rising above a world of material things, which are only shadows or images of the truer realities, the immaterial Forms. Through developing our minds, we become able to grasp these invisible Forms, and the Form of the Good that is the cause of all things.

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