A summary of Plato's "Allegory of the Cave" - how the ascent from a cave is similar to the philosopher's ascent to knowledge. *DISCLAIMER!! --

I created and presented this video as my final project for a Socratic Tradition class. In my haste to get it completed on time, I made an error with the fire placement. For those of you that I confused, I apologize. The good news is that, despite my mistake, you can still understand this allegory. Here's how:

Imagine that the fire is to the far right of the screen, behind the dancing people. That's it!

Just as in real life, the light source (in this case, the fire) needs to be behind the objects (in this case, the dancing people) in order for a shadow to be cast onto the wall.

The point of the story is that the people in the cave think that the shadow puppets are real, rather than thinking things outside the cave are real. But you can't know that anything exists outside the cave unless you go outside the cave, like the philosopher did.