The Divided Line
For more details on this topic, see Plato's divided line.In Plato's Republic, Book VI, the divided line has two parts that represent the intelligible world and the smaller visible world. Each of those two parts is divided, the segments within the intelligible world represent higher and lower forms and the segments within the visible world represent ordinary visible objects and their shadows, reflections, and other representations. The line segments are unequal and their lengths represent "their comparative clearness and obscurity" and their comparative "reality and truth," as well as whether we have knowledge or instead mere opinion of the objects.
Read more about this topic: Platonic Epistemology
Famous quotes containing the words divided and/or line:
“While you are divided from us by geographical lines, which are imaginary, and by a language which is not the same, you have not come to an alien people or land. In the realm of the heart, in the domain of the mind, there are no geographical lines dividing the nations.”
—Anna Howard Shaw (1847–1919)
“A line will take us hours maybe;
Yet if it does not seem a moment’s thought,
Our stitching and unstitching has been naught.”
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