by Phillip Smyer

Created on: January 24, 2009

Whether or not everything contained within its pages is correct and in spite of personal opinion, no one can deny that Plato's Republic is one of the most influential books of philosophy in the western world. The Republic presents theories of knowledge, ethics, and governance in a unified picture of the ideal state. The form of government and the qualities of its people would in theory produce well-being and contentment in its citizens, however Plato's city only works in theory not in practicality, therefore his republic, if put into practice, would not produce the results that Plato claims.

The question of how do we know anything existed before Plato penned his famous work and has since persisted to the modern age. Modern western culture has been heavily influenced by the ideas and opinions of The Enlightenment and therefore we typically base what we know on what we can observe and experience, the entire scientific method is based on empirical evidence. But before the enlightenment, many of Plato's ideas on knowledge were prevalent. In the analogy of the divided line he asserts that there is a scale of knowledge and that the basest form of knowledge is that founded on images or the imagination. He clarifies by calling it first shadows, then reflections in water and so on. They are perceptions of the real object. The next level of knowledge above that is the object itself, the thing upon which the imagination is based. He discusses and I will explain below in his analogy of the cave why this is not the highest form of knowledge, suffice to say for the moment that it is under the category of things seen, which automatically makes it inferior to the knowledge gained by intellection. In the realm of knowledge gained by intellection Plato discusses mathematics and geometry by saying that mathematicians when arguing about triangles and squares are not really arguing about the shapes they have drawn, but rather the figure itself. This is still not the highest form of knowledge because it is forced to go by assumptions, and it uses illustrations of the objects which in turn have shadows on the lowest level of knowledge. The highest and most pure form of knowledge to Plato is that form of knowledge attained purely by intellection, or dialectic thought. The only person who can attain this is the philosopher who can comprehend and understand that there are objects that we can see and also the thing itself which is unobservable.

Plato continues this thought and his explanation

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