Analogy Of The Divided Line
Plato, in his dialogue The Republic Book 6 (509D–513E), has Socrates explain through the literary device of a divided line his fundamental metaphysical ideas as four separate but logically connected models of the world. The four models are arranged into a first pair for the visible world, and a second pair for the purely intelligible world. The models are described in succession as corresponding to increasing levels of reality from common illusion, to belief, to reasoning, and then to philosophical understanding.
The analogy of the divided line immediately follows another Platonic metaphor, that of the sun, and is in turn followed by the Allegory of the Cave.
Read more about Analogy Of The Divided Line: Imagine A Line Divided, Metaphysical Importance, Epistemological Meaning
Famous quotes containing the words analogy, divided and/or line:
“The analogy between the mind and a computer fails for many reasons. The brain is constructed by principles that assure diversity and degeneracy. Unlike a computer, it has no replicative memory. It is historical and value driven. It forms categories by internal criteria and by constraints acting at many scales, not by means of a syntactically constructed program. The world with which the brain interacts is not unequivocally made up of classical categories.”
—Gerald M. Edelman (b. 1928)
“It is not, truly speaking, the labour that is divided; but the men: divided into mere segments of men—broken into small fragments and crumbs of life, so that all the little piece of intelligence that is left in a man is not enough to make a pin, or a nail, but exhausts itself in making the point of a pin or the head of a nail.”
—John Ruskin (1819–1900)
“A route differs from a road not only because it is solely intended for vehicles, but also because it is merely a line that connects one point with another. A route has no meaning in itself; its meaning derives entirely from the two points that it connects. A road is a tribute to space. Every stretch of road has meaning in itself and invites us to stop. A route is the triumphant devaluation of space, which thanks to it has been reduced to a mere obstacle to human movement and a waste of time.”
—Milan Kundera (b. 1929)