Episode 100, Plato's Cave (Part II - Souls)
The Panpsycast Philosophy Podcast
Jack Symes | Andrew Horton, Oliver Marley, and Rose de Castellane
4.8 • 612 Ratings
🗓️ 18 July 2021
⏱️ 61 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
A philosophical education can feel like a long and arduous path. Sometimes you think you have seen the light; you think that you have knowledge, only to discover you knew nothing. It is times like this where the learner must examine their blind spots and begin their path to understanding once again while accepting that the next attempt might too end where it began.
The philosopher Plato likened this path to the ascent from a dark cave up into the light of the sun. He also said that those who have seen the illuminated world above have a responsibility to go back to show others the way. Today we go back, not because we have seen the sun, but because we have travelled the path enough to know we can do a little better than we did before. The blind leading the blind? Perhaps, but we might stumble into something interesting along the way.
With special thanks to the following creators for their sound samples.
InspectorJ, InspectorJ(2), InspectorJ(3), InspectorJ(4), straget, jameswrowles, JG_Booysen, ethang, womb_affliction, bennychico11, HerbertBoland, ShadyDave, and 3bagbrew.
Contents
Part I. Forms
Part II. Souls
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Pan |
| 0:02.0 | Psychos |
| 0:09.0 | Part two, souls. |
| 0:12.0 | So in this week's installment, we're going to be talking about two different kinds of souls. |
| 0:17.0 | We're talking about the human individual soul and the soul of the city. We've been |
| 0:21.4 | jumping around lots of different places in the Republic, particularly in last week's |
| 0:24.9 | installment. We did the allegory of the cave and then we kind of shuffled everything around |
| 0:29.3 | and threw loads of ideas out there. Should we build a little bit more carefully this week |
| 0:33.8 | in relation to the soul? Where do we want to begin? I make no promises. |
| 0:44.4 | Just before we talk about the soul, I think just quickest of recaps. We were introduced last episode to what Plato is calling the philosophers, these people |
| 0:50.3 | who know that there is something off about the world that they exist in, that the |
| 0:56.6 | shadows are not the real things, and that they want to find out what is truly real. And they |
| 1:01.9 | find that out by use of reason and mathematics and not just through their own senses. And then |
| 1:07.8 | their job is to go and educate people and to make every and improve everybody's life. |
| 1:13.5 | In that sense, then Socrates and Plato in this book, The Republic, say they are the ones leading the republic. |
| 1:20.0 | And then we also said that the reason why they're having this discussion at all in the first place, |
| 1:25.1 | before they even get onto the forms and who these philosophers are, |
| 1:28.1 | is the question of what is justice? And they want to know what is just for an individual person, |
| 1:35.0 | so an individual soul. But Socrates thinks that that's a really difficult thing to do. |
| 1:40.3 | So he suggests that why don't we look at it on a bigger scale? |
| 1:50.6 | Because if we blow this concept up, so an analogy I came across for this is that actually you're looking like an eye chart. |
| 1:52.1 | You're going to the opticians. |
... |
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