Summary Of Plato's Allegory Of The Cave

Plato was born 428 BC in Athens with an eminent family name on his mothers and fathers side. Few records are know about Plato’s childhood; however, it is known that he began following and learning from Socrates early in his life. Plato also had an interest in a career in politics after being influenced by his uncle Critias who strongly partook in the downfall of certain democratic governments and the upbringing of an oligarchy controlled by 30 individuals. Aristotle was born in 384 BC in Stageira, Chalcidice. Aristotle’s strong interest in life lied with Science, Politics, Ethics and Logic; his works formed a foundation for religion and science chiefly in the middle Ages. A defining difference between the two philosophers would be Plato’s or
In Platos’ writing The Allegory of the Cave he writes an elaborate scenario that directly concerns human perception. Plato describes in his writing that there are prisoners chained and only able to look at the wall ahead of them and with firelight behind them they see shadows from the things moving and the prisoners knowing nothing else believe the shadows to be real. These shadows are so real to them that they place prestige on the one who can give the most detail about them or predict which shadow would arrive next, making him the master of nature. Then after a prisoner escapes his chains and goes to see his surroundings to be different then he had seen before he goes back to tell the prisoners in the cave and they refuse to believe him. He doesn’t understand their denial of his new perspective and he places himself in their perspective “if he were further compelled to gaze at the light itself, would not his eyes, think you, be distressed, and would he not shrink and turn away to the things which he could see distinctly, and consider them to be really clearer than the things pointed out to him?" (Plato). So the important concept from this writing is that people are increasingly finding the truer forms of everything. Even when someone believes to have found the final form of something they are constantly
Aristotle felt that universal/ideal forms were not exactly connected to everything, that one must analyze every aspect of an object or a theory individually. Which sounds much like Aristotles’ Aristotelian Empiricism. Between the two philosophers Plato, felt experiments and reasoning suffice to "prove" an idea or instill the characteristic of a material thing; however, Aristotle opposed this sort of logic for his “direct observation and experience”.
If you were to broaden your perspective of the two philosophers Plato used more apriori knowledge because his reality was through ideas, only knowable through reflection and reason. Aristotle who opposed that knowledge with aposteriori knowledge by finding his reality in physical things only knowable through experience. In comparison Aristotle and Plato both felt that feelings were greater than our sensory. Although through that comparison you’ll find Plato expressed that people could be fooled by senses and Aristotle expressed that actuality can’t be confirmed without our five senses. Plato’s the allegory of the cave proves to be a good example of this. Plato described the world like a cave, and a person could only see shadows casted from the outside firelight, so the only reality you could perceive would be beliefs. Now in the Aristotelian method, you would walk out of the cave and familiarize