Plato vs. ... I have been raised with a Christian worldview, so the majority of my views coincide with Augustine's rather than Plato's. ... If "humanness" is defined in terms of being a rational animal, then an individual is human to the extent that he is rational ("Plato-circa," online). ... He then figures if he saw shadows, that there must be the "real versions" elsewhere so he runs out of the cave to escape. ... We are much more intelligent than any other animal in creation. ...

• Word Count: 2720
• Approx Pages: 11
• Has Bibliography
• Grade Level: High School

David Robinson, for one, exploring Thoreau's "worldly transcendentalism," pursues a similar interest in the emergence of Thoreau's empiricism in the 1850s, but cautions against reading his ecological immersion in natural history after Walden as necessarily divorced from the poetics of "Emersonian idealism" evident in Thoreau's own earlier work: "Over the last decade of his life, Thoreau devised a set of interlinking projects in which empirical observation and metaphysical conceptualization played vital and complementary roles." (7) In this essay, I heed Robinson's caution, ...

• Word Count: 9971
• Approx Pages: 40
• Grade Level: Undergraduate