Philosophical Dictionary

The second part of the "Philosophy Carol" series in which you are visited by the Spirit of Philosophy Past, glimpsing the history of philosophy while receiving bonks on the head from an ancient tome.

Diogenes of Sinope lived in a storage jar, carried a lamp at noon and told the young Alexander the Great to stand out of his light. The memes are funny, and most of the stories survive only in a compilation written five centuries later. What did the Cynic actually stand for, and why did Alexander envy him?

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.

Philosophy started in the marketplace: Socrates talked to anyone who would answer and Diogenes ate in the agora. Plato’s Academy gave us the word “academic”, the Stoics named a school after a public porch, and philosophy cafés pulled it back onto the street. So who does it better, and is the degree worth the money?