One Day University

What values are worth dying for? What is truth, and who has the best claim to know it? Is happiness getting what you want or wanting the right things? What is the best government? These were life-and-death issues for the ancient Greeks, and their debates set patterns that still dominate our own culture. For Plato, these questions were crystallized by the execution of Socrates, his friend and mentor. Plato spent his life formulating a set of answers so powerful and compelling that Alfred North Whitehead, the famous mathematician and philosopher, once described western philosophy as a “series of footnotes to Plato.” In this lecture, we’ll focus on a single passage—Plato’s famous parable of the cave—that pulls together many of the strands of Plato’s thought. We’ll explore the implications of his allegory both for western thought and for our own lives.