Philosophical Dictionary

Plenty of people online call themselves free thinkers. The word became a battle cry in 1713, Nietzsche wanted nothing to do with it, and Socrates offered his poverty as proof of honesty while Spinoza turned down a professorship. Can you think freely when someone pays you, and who pays the free thinkers?

In the meme, the rest of academia asks philosophy to do something about its superiority complex, and philosophy calmly replies that it is superior. Philosophy was once called the queen of the sciences, physicists have declared it dead, and the term “superiority complex” comes from a psychologist. So who is right?

In the split screen meme, Plato sits high and Aristotle sits on the floor, cardboard between their halves of the TV. The joke goes back to Raphael’s School of Athens in the Vatican and two hand gestures. Behind them is a 2,300-year argument about Forms, property and ethics. Who won, and was Plato even Plato?

Absurdism, existentialism and nihilism start from the same uncomfortable silence: the universe does not answer our questions about meaning. Nihilism shrugs, existentialism builds its own meaning, and Camus called the believers’ leap philosophical suicide. So is absurdism just existentialism with good vibes?

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?

“Without objective morality, everything is permissible” sounds like a knockout argument, and a sandwich meme made it a joke. The sentence is usually pinned on Dostoevsky, Sartre built existentialism on it, and Nietzsche thought atheists who kept their morals were cheating. Does objective morality need God at all?