Class Discussion~Plato

Plato was an influential ancient Greek philosopher who was born in the year 427 BC in Athens, Greece. He was the son of wealthy Athenian parents and he began his philosophical career as a student of Socrates. After his father’s death, his mother married a friend of PericlesPlato was one of the most famous, respected, and influential philosophers of all time. We know the Greek philosopher Socrates mostly through Plato's dialogues. Plato was after Socrates and learned from his teachings.  It is because of Plato that we are most familiar with Socrates' philosophy because Plato wrote dialogues that his teacher took part. Plato later began to develop his own philosophy and the Socrates of the later dialogues does more teaching than he does questioning.
He thought that everything had a sort of ideal form, like the idea of a chair, and then an actual chair was a sort of poor imitation of the ideal chair that exists only in your mind. One of the ways Plato tried to explain his ideas was with the famous metaphor of the cave. He said, Suppose there is a cave, and inside the cave there are some men chained up to a wall, so that they can only see the back wall of the cave and nothing else. These men can't see anything outside of the cave, or even see each other clearly, but they can see shadows of what is going on outside the cave. Wouldn't these prisoners come to think that the shadows were real, and that was what things really looked like?