1/5/21 - Tuesday Afternoon: Plato (Tyler H)

 Right after our lunch break, We got right into discussing philosophy via our ancient pal Plato. The work that we discussed was the allegory of the cave. In this story there are a few people chained in a cave unable to move even their heads, they spend their whole lives that way looking at a cave wall. Behind these people there is a fire lighting up that wall, and people holding objects that cast shadows on said wall. This was the way they grew up in, only knowing the cave and the shadows, so this is what they thought the whole world was (which conveniently ties in to the world construction part of this course). As I research now I am finding different tellings of the story, but essentially one of the people gets loose and goes into the outside world. At first this person is scared because everything is new, and in our discussion we agreed that people are usually afraid of change, which is logical because why would people want to go out of their comfort zone into a realm of uncertainty. But after initially rejecting the outside world, the freed person realizes how much more there is to the world they've constructed in their minds that can be explored. However upon returning to the cave to tell the other people, they reject this idea, saying it was crazy that there could be more to life than what they have come to know, warning the freed person not to remove the rest of their chains. This work was really thought provoking, we had a very productive seminar afterwards, touching on the ways that this story represents our reality and how people feel about change. It was a very philosophical seminar if I do say so myself, I definitely had trouble following along at times but I guess thats to be expected when we are debating philosophy from some couple thousand years ago. But no biggie, it was a great way to start off the course for the next two weeks and I am definitely excited to learn more.

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