Philosophical Dictionary

In the nothingness meme, the void cuddles Eastern philosophers and beats up Western ones. Leibniz asked why there is something rather than nothing and answered with God, Heidegger found the nothing in anxiety, and Carnap called it nonsense. And is Buddhist emptiness, sunyata, a polite word for nihilism?

A social construct exists because people keep treating it as real: money, borders, marriage, a company. Constructed is not the same as fake, and shouting “social construct” can end an argument without winning it. What did Berger, Searle, Hacking and Butler actually claim, and where does human nature fit in?

Watch a lion eat a deer in a lion documentary and you cheer; watch it in a deer documentary and you look away. Nietzsche built a whole theory of morality on that switch, with lambs, birds of prey, debts and priests. Was he really on the lion’s side, or is the story more complicated than the meme lets on?

One meme sums up three theories of human nature: a feral brute for Hobbes, a cheerful innocent for Rousseau, and a crab in full panic for Freud. The real arguments are stranger. Rousseau never said “noble savage”, and Hobbes thought we lock our doors at night for a reason. Is there an essence of man at all?

A quote card about someone who asks for nothing but your company, then a stick figure demanding a factory. We explain the meme, then what Marx actually meant by owning the means of production, why your toothbrush was never at risk, and what he thought of worker co-ops. So would Marx really want your company?

A pumpkin carved with “inferring causation from correlation” is a statistician’s idea of horror. David Hume argued we do not even see causes, only one thing following another. Yet Doll and Hill linked smoking to lung cancer without an experiment. So how does science get from correlation to causation at all?