Knowledge, that certain indescribable thing that everyone thinks they possess a bit of, is an elusive concept that almost all philosophers, from ancient Greece to the moderns the day gave at least a nod to. After all, how can we know we are right about something if we don't know what knowledge is? This question, and the sometimes futile attempt to answer it, is called epistemology. More specifically, it is the study of how we know and what that knowledge actually is. Is knowledge objective, subjective, something else, or even possible? In ancient Greece, a group of men known as the Sophists sold their "knowledge" without ever believing that absolute knowledge was possible. According to them, the only things that could be known were the user's subjective skills. Skepticism of this variety was encountered by one of the great minds of philosophy, Socrates, who spent much of his life, as we know it through Plato, arguing against sophism and its many forms in an attempt to actually discover what could be known . and if anyone actually knew anything. Knowledge, for Socrates, was something called arete' or virtue, and the only thing Socrates knew was that he knew nothing which made him, ironically, the most knowledgeable man in Athens, at least if his account is to be believed of the visit to the Oracle. in Delphi. It is questionable whether Socrates ever succeeded in establishing what knowledge is or is not, but his student and follower, Plato, takes up Socrates' cause in the Republic and, with a combination of Socrates' ideas and some of his own, attempts to show in “The Allegory of the Cave” what different types of knowledge are possible and how they are obtained.2Plato's work,......middle of the paper......is a journey of discovery for me to get closer to a sun, if not the sun. Like them, I started with something, a desire, and, freed from my shackles, I toiled my way through my cave in search of what I could call real. Whether or not there is a real universal becomes irrelevant because, in the end, it is all about the seemingly infinite journey in itself and, like Camus, the knowledge that the journey is up to me to make of it what I want.8 Works Cited Neuleib, Janice, Kathleen Shine Cain and Stephen Ruffus, eds. The Mercury Reader: Advancing Composition, English 103. Boston: Pearson, 2013. Print.Bacon, Francis.“Of Studies.”Neuleib, Cain, and Ruffus 7-10.Camus, Albert. "The Myth of Sisyphus." Neulieb, Cain and Ruffus 11-15.Plato. “The Allegory of the Cave”. Neulieb, Cain and Ruffus 1-6.