ABSTRACT
Empiricism is the common sense position that the senses do not deceive us. That is, they are the direct and true path through which humans obtain knowledge about the world. So powerful and self-evident does this proposition seem that it is difcult to imagine objections to it. Greek philosopher Plato, however, made clear his objections in The Republic, a dialog in which he places a group of men in a cave, chaining them so that they can see only one wall of the cave.1 Behind them is a re that they cannot see and a person who passes a series of images behind them, but they can see only shadows of these images, which through their senses they perceive as reality. This is the human condition in which the senses cannot apprehend reality. All they can manage is a shadowy, impermanent, inconstant sense of what they erroneously perceive as reality. In fact, they are twice removed from reality because the re that provides illumination is not the ultimate source of light. One must break free, pass the re, and ascend to the opening of the cave and into the sunlight, which is the ultimate source of light. Even then, the person who manages to reach the opening of the cave will need time to adjust to the light. If he descends back down the cave to tell his comrades that he has apprehended reality as it is, they may be apt to kill him for attacking what they perceive to be knowledge derived from the senses. How then does one apprehend reality? Plato gives his answer in the Phaedo, in which the intellect seeks its own space, where apart from the body and the senses, it contemplates, by reason alone, reality as it is.2 That is, the intellect alone and apart from the senses is the source of knowledge about reality. At a deep level, Plato struck a chord. All religions assume the existence of a reality beyond the senses, and Christianity borrowed heavily from Plato’s ideas.
