Philosophical Dictionary

The last post in our Presocratics series, let's take a look at the oneness of poet and philosopher Parmenides of Elea, examining his ideas on human knowledge and how the universe works.

Epicurus told his students that death is nothing to us: while we exist, death is not here, and when it comes, we are gone. Lucretius added a mirror argument, Thomas Nagel objected, and Epicurus faced his own death with a letter about a happy day. Does the argument hold, and what did he mean by pleasure?

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?

In the Aristotle and Plato meme, Plato hands his student a dish labelled “a fairly congruent theory of metaphysics” and Aristotle flings it across the room. Behind the joke sit two rival answers about where reality lives, what courage is, who should rule and how to find anything out. Which of them did the meme miss?

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?