This allegory is among the most well-traversed passages in Plato's dialogues and deservedly so. Its emotional impact is undeniable, yet it confronts the reader with several problems of interpretation. There is a strong sense that it is of central importance to the crucial questions of the Platonic philosopher's education and his role in society, and it possibly holds one key to an understanding of the Republic as a whole.

This allegory is among the most well-traversed passages in Plato's dialogues and deservedly so. Its emotional impact is undeniable, yet it confronts the reader with several problems of interpretation. There is a strong sense that it is of central importance to the crucial questions of the Platonic philosopher's education and his role in society, and it possibly holds one key to an understanding of the Republic as a whole.

This paper takes a detailed look at the Republic’s Divided Line analogy and considers how we should respond to its most contentious implication: that pistis and dianoia have the same degree of ‘clarity’ (σαφήνεια). It argues that we must take this implication at face value and that doing so allows us to better understand both the analogy and the nature of dianoia.

In general, scholars have viewed the mathematical detail of Plato’s Divided Line discussion in Republic VI-VII as irrelevant to the substance of his epistemology.Against this stance this essay argues that this detail serves a serious and instructive purpose and makes manifest some central features of Plato’s account of human knowledge.

At the end of Republic VI. Socrates compares the Good with the sun as a cause both of existence and intelligibility. Afterwards, when he continues and expands this comparison, the symbolism becomes so complex that the interpretation of almost every part of it is in dispute. We start with the contrast of light and darkness; to this is next added the contrast of image and original, and also of up and down along a vertical line; in the allegory of the (...) Cave these three sets of contrasted terms are worked in together so as to explain the effect on the soul of the intellectual education by which we are converted from what is dark and imitative and ascend finally to knowledge of the Good. (shrink)

Current interpretations of Plato’s cave are obviously incorrect because they do not explain how what we hear does not come from what we see. I argue that Plato is saying that the colors we receive from our faculty of vision do not cause the sounds that we receive from our faculty of hearing. I also show how we do not see ourselves or one other, how the shadows on the wall of the cave are images of that which casts them (...) and therefore have less reality than them, and how the cave illustrates the divided line’s concern for the relationship between Forms and visible reality. The paper is structured around the two great riddles of the divided line: how Forms can be more real than everyday objects, and how one can know the unhypothesized beginning with complete certainty. I further argue that the puppets that cast shadows stand for the immanent Forms of the Phaedo and also for the moving Forms of the Timaeus. That of which these puppets are themselves images would thus stand for the Forms as they are in themselves of the Phaedo or the indestructible Forms of the Timaeus. ‘Plato used to ask whether the discussion was proceeding from or leading up to fundamental principles, just as in a race course there is a difference between running from the judges to the far end of the track and running back again.’ – Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics 1095. (shrink)

There is a problem about belief and knowledge in Plato's epistemology that has exercised serious students of Plato only to settle into a recent orthodoxy. Guthrie characterizes the problem and its current resolution this way: ‘In the Meno doxa appeared to be a dim apprehension of the same objects of which knowledge is a clear and complete understanding … in the Republic each is directed to different objects, knowledge to the Forms and doxa to the sensible world alone … at (...) least the opinion seems now to prevail that on the relationship between doxa and knowledge Meno and Republic are irreconcilable, and exhibit a complete change of mind on Plato's part.'. (shrink)

In this paper I defend a reading of eikasia as the viewing of an image as an image; this condition need not involve any confusion of image and original. The “standard reading” of eikasia, on which experiencing this state involves mistaking images for originals, is unsatisfactory, despite the fact that it offers an attractive account of the relation of the line and the cave. The initial description of eikasia makes the suggestion that Socrates believes that anyone consistently mistakes images for (...) originals implausible. Furthermore, the similarity later described between eikasia and dianoia, the third highest state on the line, supports the claim that eikasia can sometimes involve the successful study of an object through its image. After outlining my view of eikasia and explaining these arguments against the “standard” view, I return to the cave and attempt a pairing of the line and the cave that accords with my account of eikasia. (shrink)

This paper defends a reading of eikasia—the lowest kind of cognition in the Divided Line—as a kind of empirical cognition that Plato appeals to when explaining, among other things, the origin of ethical error. The paper has two central claims. First, eikasia with respect to, for example, goodness or justice is not different in kind to eikasia with respect to purely sensory images like shadows and reflections: the only difference is that in the first case the sensory images include representations (...) of value properties. Second, eikasia is not the bare awareness of images or simply a label for an error (mistaking image for original) but a kind of empirical, image-confined cognition, and one that has an important part to play in characterising the cognitive abilities of the non-rational parts of the soul. (shrink)