The Philosopher Meme Explained: Why Philosophy Keeps Asking the Same Questions

Last updated: October 20, 2026

The philosopher meme is a crop of Raphael’s fresco The School of Athens, painted in 1509 to 1511 for the Stanza della Segnatura in the Vatican, with the same caption on two figures: “literally any philosopher”. One writes in a large book, the other bends over his own notes and appears to copy him. The joke has a respectable pedigree. In Process and Reality (1929), Alfred North Whitehead wrote that the safest general characterization of the European philosophical tradition is that it consists of “a series of footnotes to Plato”.

The figure with the big book is, by near-universal agreement, Pythagoras. The old, bald man who seems to copy him has been identified as Anaximander, Empedocles or Boethius, and the identification remains uncertain; Raphael left no key, and as Katherine Smith Abbott and Stephen Abbott put it in a paper on the fresco, the identities of its philosophers “have a way of shifting with the passage of time”. Just behind them, a turbaned figure traditionally identified as Averroes, the twelfth-century commentator on Aristotle, leans in to read over Pythagoras’s shoulder. Pythagoras lived in the sixth century BC and Averroes died in 1198, so Raphael has some seventeen centuries of philosophy reading the same page. He probably wasn’t joking. The internet took care of that.

Raphael Put Seventeen Centuries in One Room

The School of Athens shows philosophers from different eras sharing one floor, so a meme about philosophers copying each other is closer to the original than it looks.

Raphael painted the fresco for Pope Julius II on one wall of a room whose other walls show theology, poetry and law. In the centre walk Plato and Aristotle. Plato points upward and carries his Timaeus; Aristotle stretches his hand out level and carries his Ethics, as the Vatican Museums describe them. The popular reading is that one points to the eternal Forms and the other to the world we can observe, a reading the scholarship treats as likely rather than settled. Around them stand thinkers who could never have met. Leonardo is widely believed to have lent his face to Plato, Michelangelo his to Heraclitus, and Raphael put his own face near the right edge. Historical accuracy was never the brief. The fresco stages a room where people separated by centuries read each other’s work as if they were colleagues, which is roughly how philosophy students experience the reading list.

Whitehead Meant Questions, Not Answers

Whitehead’s line is usually quoted as a put-down of everyone after Plato. In context it is a claim about where philosophical questions come from, not about who had the right answers.

Right after the famous sentence, he adds that he does not mean the systematic doctrine scholars have extracted from the dialogues. He means “the wealth of general ideas scattered through them” (the passage is in Process and Reality, Part II, chapter 1, section 1). Plato’s dialogues raise a remarkable share of the questions the meme is laughing about: what knowledge is, what justice is, whether the soul survives the body, whether the world we see is the real one. They raise them as conversations, where characters disagree and many exchanges end without a settled answer. On Whitehead’s reading, later philosophers are less like copyists than like readers adding notes in the margin of an open text. He was writing a metaphysics of his own in that book, one that departs from Plato in many places, so the remark was hardly a vow of loyalty.

Aristotle Copied His Teacher, Then Said He Was Wrong

The first great footnote to Plato was a correction. Aristotle studied at Plato’s Academy for about twenty years, from the age of seventeen until Plato’s death in 347 BC, according to the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, and then argued against his teacher’s theory of Forms in several of his major works.

In the Nicomachean Ethics (Book I, chapter 6, 1096a), Aristotle turns to the idea of a single universal Good and admits the inquiry is awkward, because the theory was introduced by friends of his. He goes ahead anyway: “since both are dear to us, we are bound to prefer the truth”, in the translation on Project Gutenberg. This passage is the usual source given for the later Latin proverb Amicus Plato, sed magis amica veritas, “Plato is a friend, but truth is a greater friend”, which does not appear in Aristotle in that form.

The early Latin versions named Socrates rather than Plato, and the proverb kept travelling: the young Isaac Newton wrote a version of it above the philosophical questions in his Cambridge student notebook, adding Aristotle to the list of friends who rank below the truth. That is the meme in practice. The second philosopher does copy the first, closely enough to know exactly where to disagree.

Giants, Dwarfs and an Image Older Than Newton

“Standing on the shoulders of giants” is often credited to Isaac Newton, but he was borrowing a medieval image that was already more than five hundred years old.

The image is usually credited to Bernard of Chartres, a twelfth-century teacher, through John of Salisbury’s Metalogicon (1159, Book III, chapter 4), as Manuel Mañas Núñez sets out in his study of the Metalogicon. Bernard compared his own generation to dwarfs perched on the shoulders of giants, who see further than the giants did, not because their own sight is sharper but because they are carried up high. Newton used the image in a letter to his rival Robert Hooke dated 5 February 1675/76. A few writers, among them the historian of science Robert Crease, have read it as a dig at Hooke; others take it as a stock compliment of the period. Either way, it is a theory of progress built on borrowing, in which the dwarf contributes almost no height and still gets the view.

Hume Woke Kant Up

The pattern repeats wherever philosophy moves fast: one thinker reads another closely, finds a problem that is hard to unsee, and spends years answering it.

David Hume argued that we never observe a necessary connection between cause and effect, only one event regularly following another, so our confidence in causation rests on habit. Immanuel Kant wrote in the preface to his Prolegomena (1783) that remembering Hume was what first interrupted his “dogmatic slumber”, a passage the SEP entry on Kant and Hume on causality discusses at length. Kant described his Critique of Pure Reason (1781) as working out “Hume’s problem” in its widest form. He kept the question and changed the terms in which it could be asked, and Hegel and much of the nineteenth century would in turn define themselves by what they kept from Kant and what they binned.

Chalmers Counts the Progress and Comes Up Short

Philosophy makes progress of a kind, but not the kind physics makes, and philosophers disagree about how much. That disagreement is the serious version of the meme.

In a widely cited paper, “Why Isn’t There More Progress in Philosophy?” (Philosophy, 2015), David Chalmers defends what he calls a glass-half-empty view. He measures progress by collective convergence to the truth on the big questions, and by that measure philosophy has converged far less than the hard sciences. Questions about free will, consciousness and the foundations of morality remain open after more than two thousand years. Chalmers does count some progress: philosophers converge quite well on negative results, ruling views out, and they understand the arguments better than before.

A related explanation goes back to Bertrand Russell, who argued in The Problems of Philosophy (1912, chapter XV) that once a subject allows definite knowledge, it stops being called philosophy and becomes a separate science, as physics and psychology did. Chalmers finds this plausible but incomplete, since those new sciences left the big philosophical questions standing. On Russell’s picture, philosophy is left holding whatever hasn’t found a method yet, which would explain why it so often looks like it is going in circles.

Why Nobody Gets to Answer Plato’s Question the Way Plato Did

Philosophers do keep returning to the same questions, but the answers rejected along the way change what any later answer has to look like.

Take knowledge. A modern philosopher cannot simply repeat the old formula of knowledge as justified true belief, a close cousin of which (true belief plus an account) Plato tested and dropped in the Theaetetus, because Edmund Gettier’s counterexamples of 1963 showed it falls short, as the SEP entry on the analysis of knowledge explains. Any new answer has to deal with them. A modern defender of free will, likewise, has to reckon with arguments from neuroscience that Kant never saw. The question survives; many of the old answers do not, at least not in their old form. So the second figure in the fresco is copying, sure. Give him twenty years and he will be writing the objection.

For one philosopher who tried to tear the whole tradition down and start again from a single certainty, read our post on Descartes’ revolution and the mind-body problem.