 If you're a kid in the 90s and ever watched The Courage the Cowardly Dog cartoon, boy you're in for a treat. The title character of this kid's show is an anthropomorphic dog, who lives with an elderly couple in a farmhouse in the middle of nowhere. And in each episode the trio is thrown into bizarre, frequently disturbing and often paranormal and supernatural type misadventures, where Courage encounters various villains with his fear and context playing a key role in how he perceives the world. But is this ultimately true and what does it have to do with Plato? Between 438 and 348 BC there was this individual called Plato who used to tell this story about people being trapped and confined in a cave since birth, always facing the cave's wall. And the evil trickster who made all of this possible has built a fire and uses it to project shadows onto the cave's wall in front of the prisoners. Now what these people know is only the shadows casted on the wall in front of them. They try to see shadows of animals, people, objects and other beings of Earth. But they do not truly know what they are, they think what they see is the real world and they assign their own meaning to these figures. Until one day one of the people in the cave manages to get outside and get to experience this new layer that we now call the real world. And when he comes back to announce this epic trio to others he is now unable to see in the dark mists of the cave. And the people that are still living inside of the cave still believe that even if there is an outside, it is dangerous to go out there. This is called Plato's allegory of the cave. Now Plato uses this to sketch an understandable portrait of what it means to be a philosopher in his attempt to educate the public. But what does it have to do with courage the cowardly dog cartoon? Well if you think about it, everything. The same way courage sees his environment with mean people trying to hurt his owners with him trying to protect his reality with all costs, the same way Plato's people want to remain in the cave. In a way courage only sees what's in front of him and has a small world view because his owners are old and do not take him outside. And this is why the dog believes that his world is truly in the middle of nowhere and essentially stays unaware of what's out there. He also has his own shadow being casted on the wall in the intro which feeds into the theory that everything is only happening inside a courage's mind. Now this story creates a beautiful transition to understanding that the cave can represent these people who think that knowledge comes only from what we see and hear, the external stimuli. And this is still relevant because it can be read in far more ways. One must remember that Plato was no ordinary guy. He of course had crazy ideas such as the womb being a wild animal or that us humans are only mere featherless bipeds but he also came up with thoughts that fed into the creation of all western philosophy. Because the 20th century philosopher Alfred North whitehead put it, the safe general characterization of European philosophical tradition is that it consists of a series of footnotes to Plato. One can even stretch it so much that we could say that Plato predicted quantum mechanics where the cave story still represents our inability to understand the true essence of reality. And Plato sensed this and attempted to convince others that it was a natural part of life and one should not be pushed back by our lack of understanding of the world but instead accept it and try to push the barriers of our abilities of the mind. The world is full of obvious things which nobody by any chance ever observes. The cave story also feeds into another golden nugget which is Plato's theory of the form in which things in the physical world are only flawed reflections of ideal forms. And this is why we now have the word in the term Platonism which is the view that there exists such things as abstract objects where an abstract object is an object that does not exist in space or time and which is therefore entirely non-physical and non-mental. And this is why Platonism in this sense is a contemporary view as well. Now some people think that Plato is indeed overrated but not irrelevant. As far as I understood we do not really know how much of Plato's writings was based on his own ideas and how much did he use to stand on the shoulders of giants like Socrates. One of his fundamental works like The Republic comes and outlines some ideas that might seem impractical such as having mating festivals, no families and children being raised by the state. He also throws in that instead of having politicians and stuff you can have a philosopher king that will somehow remain enlightened and sane and not become a megalomaniac. And Plato is a gatekeeper, an expression of rationalism in the philosophical sense and he may have had a greater impact on the formation of Western philosophy than anybody else in history. And I think that it was a sincere attempt to make sense of reality using the best arguments and evidence available at that time because the most valuable aspect of studying philosophy in my opinion is that it teaches rational inquiry as a way of life. And it shows that all of these strange theories may coexist with a shared belief in reason as the way to truth.