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Cartoon

Plato’s Noble Lie

A strip by Corey Mohler about Plato’s Noble Lie.

Plato in his Republic said that you basically had to come up with national myths and a ‘noble lie’ that would placate the uneducated population and make them do their duty to the city without really understanding why. Separately, one consequence of Plato’s theory of forms is that abstract concepts, such as numbers, ‘really’ exist in some sense. So “the concept of the number seven” exists independently of us, in the realm of forms.

Each week, Corey Mohler draws a new Existential Comics strip and posts it at existentialcomics.com.