Philosophical Dictionary

We discuss what Immanuel Kant called his "dogmatic slumber," how he woke from it to write his essential works in philosophy, sparking a revolution in thought that would shake the Western world.

A discussion of the influences of Hegel's dialectics on the work of Karl Marx, and his influence on the greater world.

It is the most famous formula in philosophy class, and Hegel never used it for his own method. We trace thesis, antithesis, synthesis back to Kant, Fichte and a forgotten popularizer, then show how Hegel’s dialectic actually works, from being and nothing to freedom and love. So why does the wrong version stick?

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?

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.

Materialism and idealism disagree about what reality is made of, and the fight has run since Plato called it a war of giants and gods. A bishop denied matter, a critic kicked a stone, Marx flipped Hegel upside down. So what do the two camps actually claim, and which side are most philosophers on today?