Plato, fetters round the neck, and the Quran

I analyze fi gures and themes of Plato’s “Allegory of the Cave” evident in chapter thirty-six of the Quran. I argue that the two texts share (1) a neck fetter fixing the head; (2) a spatial organization of barriers before and behind and covering above; (3) a theme of failure to see the truth and assault upon those who tell the truth, and (4) a theme of transcendent reality as a context of meaning. I argue that the Quran displays an inheritance of some Platonic thought in Arabic at least two centuries prior to any known translation of Plato.

GILLES DELEUZE AND BERNARDO BERTOLUCCI ON PLATO'S CAVE

The allegory of the Cave in Republic 514a–18d is one of the most memorable Platonic images. The depiction of chained humans in a cavernous dwelling looking at shadows of objects cast on a parapet in front of them but unable to locate the objects themselves until one of them is freed, turns around to see the objects, and finally leaves the cave has haunted and inspired readers throughout the centuries. The prisoners are said to be ‘like us’ (515a), which is taken to refer either to human life in general or to human life in corrupt political environments. Plato's core metaphysical and epistemological doctrines are thought to inhere in the Cave, his belief that the sensible world, represented by the cave, holds people captive to defective and erroneous appearances, and that only philosophy can free and enlighten them, leading them out of the cave to the intelligible realm of the eternal Forms. The cave then houses captives since childhood who believe that shadows of artifacts exhaust reality, and captors who project images of artifacts on the wall and thereby manipulate what the captives see and hear.

The Elements

Chapter 3 moves from the elements of the physical world to the elements of abstract geometry as set out in Euclid’s Elements. It looks at Euclid’s axiomatic method of building geometry step by step from a short collection of definite notions or axioms, and Plato’s allegory of the cave and the world of ideals. In his dialogue Timaeus Plato suggested that each element of matter, Earth, Air, Fire, and Water, is composed of tiny regular solids. He identified the fifth regular solid, the dodecahedron, with the cosmos. Aristotle described the fifth element as aether or quintessence. These ideas lay at the heart of western thought for about 2,000 years, and their influence can be seen in the medieval Christian world system, Renaissance artworks, and the writings of the astronomer Johannes Kepler.

ESENSI PENDIDIKAN ONTOLOGIS HEIDEGGER BAGI PENDIDIKAN TINGGI

This paper is aimed at examining the Heidegger's ideas in dealing with the current crisis in higher education. Such issues as instrumentalization, professionalization, vocationalization, and technologization in today's modern university have resulted in the increasing hyper-specialization and ruinous fragmentation of its all aspects. On this stand, Heidegger offers an ontological conception of education that is purposefully capable of bringing about a renaissance of the university. Inspired by the Plato’s popular ‘allegory of the cave’, Heidegger both excavates and appropriates the original Western educational ideal of Platonic paideia. In addition, The Heidegger's notion of ontological education could be considered as a philosophical perfectionism, a re-essentialization of the currently empty ideal of educational ‘excellence’ by which Heidegger believes we can reconnect teaching to research and, ultimately, reunify and revitalize the university itself.Keywords: Ontological education, Allegory of the Cave, Paideia, re-essentialization

The Allegory of the Cave, the Ending of the Republic, and the Stages of Moral Enlightenment

This essay aims to shed new light on the stages of moral enlightenment in the Allegory of the Cave, of which there are three. I focus on the two stages within the cave, represented by eikasia and pistis, and provide a phenomenological description of these two mental states. The second part of the essay argues that there is a structural parallelism between the Allegory of the Cave and the ending of the Republic. The parallelism can be convincingly demonstrated by a purely formal analysis, but additionally it complements and reinforces the original interpretation of the Cave, insofar as the ending of the Republic also mirrors, on the level of content, the previously adduced stages of moral enlightenment.

Critical Attitude

This chapter pays attention to the question of government, composition of things, and consequent multiplication of the pedagogic, political, economic, and methodological arts that took place as of the sixteenth century. It talks about disassociation from critique, the “critical attitude” that will be expressed in a more modern fashion in the question of “how not to be governed.” The chapter also mentions Plato's Allegory of the Cave. In it, Plato provides a whole repertoire of locations of frontiers and thresholds and investments in a regard that is pregnant with life-or-death consequences, in theologies of salvation or damnation as well as epistemic moralities of truth and falsity. Within the stage machinery of comings and goings, it was decisive that a center is established so as to give meaning to movement and place.

Review of Mauro Carbone, Philosophy-Screens: From Cinema to the Digital Revolution

In this text, my aim is to provide a reading of Mauro Carbone’s Philosophy Screens: From Cinema to the Digital Revolution in the context of his other writings. My claim is that in this most recent work, Carbone makes a decisive step from being an original interpreter of the work of Merleau-Ponty and Proust to making an original contribution to what I describe, following Merleau-Ponty and Carbone, the history of “a-philosophy”: an historical attempt to reverse the “official philosophy” that has been with us since at least Plato. This reversal is staged through a series of concepts, created by Carbone, that I take up here viz à viz Plato’s allegory of the cave: the archescreen, the sensible idea, the screen, and philosophy-cinema (a concept borrowed from Deleuze). Together, these concepts illustrate what I call, borrowing a phrase from Jean-Luc Nancy, a philosophical partance: for Carbone, the work of “philosophizing” should no longer be conceptualized in accordance with Platonic imagery of ascent, illumination, conversion, and importantly, grasping and seizing upon the είδη but as “departure”: allowing the objects of thought their transcendence, a liquidity by which they slip through our grasp.