Philosophical Dictionary

“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?

Nietzsche really titled his chapters “Why I Am So Wise” and “Why I Write Such Good Books”. Ecce Homo was finished just before his collapse and kept from readers for nearly twenty years. Its title quotes Pilate at the trial of Jesus. So was he joking or losing his mind? And which famous quotes did he never write?

The Seneca meme shows a man practising voluntary discomfort, then sleeping on a pile of cash. An accuser in Tacitus put Seneca’s fortune at 300 million sesterces, and Seneca himself admitted the gap between his words and his life. Nietzsche accused them of a fraud of words. Does any of that make Seneca wrong?

The Plato’s cave meme turns the feed into a cave: internet users chained, algorithms casting shadows, one guy who logs off. Plato’s own text has a prize for predicting the shadows, Nietzsche’s abyss line begins with monsters, and filtered selfies made the shadow personal. So is leaving the cave enough?

Thomas Szasz called mental illness a myth in 1961, R.D. Laing read madness as a divided self, and a former DSM editor later warned of diagnostic inflation. A 1979 study even asked whether depressed people are sadder but wiser. Which of these claims survived their critics, and which quietly fell apart?