Philosophical Dictionary

The meme has Plato lying back with a cigar after winning arguments against his made-up characters. Many of those characters were real people, and Plato does not always let Socrates win. So what is the Socratic method, why did Socrates call it midwifery, and does it still work once you leave the dialogue?

Socrates memes keep returning to two scenes: a trial for corrupting the youth of Athens and a cup of poison in a prison cell. We read the charge in Plato’s Apology, the death in the Phaedo and Jacques-Louis David’s famous painting, then check the memes against them. How much did the internet get right?

“Why can’t you just be normal?” Socrates, in the meme, screams back: define normal. He asked questions like that all day, unpaid, and they got him into trouble. Wittgenstein doubted that we need definitions at all, yet health systems and diagnostic manuals depend on them. Who gets to say what normal means?

The philosophy meme is blunt: open Kant or Hegel with no background and the book bites. Kant knew readers found the Critique dry and obscure, and Hume disowned his first book as juvenile work. So should beginners start with primary texts or secondary literature, and which books should a beginner read first?

No circle you have ever drawn is a perfect circle, and yet you know exactly what a perfect circle is. Plato thought that small puzzle proves there is a second, more real world: the realm of Forms. Here is the theory of Forms in plain English, with Plato’s own examples, the Form of the Good, the slave boy who “remembers” geometry, the objections Plato raised against himself, Aristotle’s and Diogenes’ mockery, and why mathematicians and programmers still think like Platonists.

Materialism and idealism disagree about what reality is made of, and the fight has run since Plato called it a war of giants and gods. A bishop denied matter, a critic kicked a stone, Marx flipped Hegel upside down. So what do the two camps actually claim, and which side are most philosophers on today?