HCJ Seminar #1

Our first point of discussion in this seminar was Plato's 'Theory of Ideas' which he explains with his fabled cave analogy. The basic idea of this is that there are prisoners chained together in a cave, they're facing a wall so they know nothing of the outside world and the wonders it has to be discovered. All they can see is their shadows. However, one turns around and sees the world. This inspires him to free himself from his shackles and explore this creation that he now has the freedom to roam. Years later he returns to the cave to find his fellow prisoners still stood there staring at the shadows, making hand signals and laughing at how one looks like a dinosaur and the other a rabbit. He tries to explain to them what's behind them to be discovered but they refuse to listen and thus they never open their eyes to the beauty of the Earth. The man who escaped? A philosopher, obviously.

This may seem like gobble-di-gook, but trust me, it's not. For if you break it down it becomes apparent what Plato was hankering on about. We normal people, the simpletons, are represented by the prisoners and the world as we know it is represented by the cave wall. The shadows are the 'forms' and represent every object we have in our lives, everything we see, everything we touch, everything we hear. Plato's theories suggest that the bed I am currently sat on is imperfect and a shadow, but in another world, another dimension possibly, there is a perfect version of this bed, a better form.

Religions started to pounce on these ideas and use them as their basis of heaven, something to work towards, where only those of a pure soul can have a perfect after-life. If your sole was tainted you would end up in purgatory or worse, hell. By making seemingly shallow threats such as these and relating it to philosophy, religion can use the Theory of Ideas to control people to do what their god supposedly desires.

Thales is seen as the first official philosopher as he can be dated, due to the fact that he correctly predicted an eclipse. This was the first attempt at a science experiment as the date of the eclipse could be proved or disproved simply by whether it happened or not. He was the mentor of Anaximander who opposed Thales ideas that everything is made out of the elements - earth, wind, fire and water. Instead, Anaximander suggested that the elements work in a cycle and you can see where he's coming from: fire vaporises water, water douses fire, earth can soak water, water can flood the earth, earth can put out a fire and fire can destroy the earth.