Philosophical Dictionary

Slavoj Žižek is the Slovenian philosopher who explains Hegel with dirty jokes, Hollywood films and toilets. Behind the sniffing and the “and so on, and so on” there is one big idea: ideology is not what you believe, it is what you keep doing even when you know better. Here is Žižek in plain English: his life, Lacan for beginners, the big Other, the order to enjoy, Starbucks, Titanic, violence, his fights with Peterson and Chomsky, and where to start reading.

Existentialism says you show up first and figure out what you are for later. No manual, no factory settings, and no one to blame for your choices. Here is what Sartre, Kierkegaard, Beauvoir, Heidegger and Camus actually meant, why an existential crisis is part of the deal, where the whole thing started (with an apricot cocktail), and how existentialism differs from nihilism and absurdism.

Prisoners chained in a cave take shadows for reality. One gets out, sees the sun, and comes back to tell the others, who laugh at him and would kill him if they could. Here is a simple summary of Plato’s Allegory of the Cave, what every symbol means, how it connects to the theory of Forms, the sun and the divided line, why it ends with a threat of murder, and why it still describes our screens today.

Hedonism says pleasure is the highest good, yet history’s most famous hedonist lived on bread and water and called a pot of cheese a feast. The Cyrenaics, Epicurus, Bentham’s pig problem, Nozick’s experience machine and the hedonic treadmill.

Say the wrong word and someone will call it a Freudian slip. Where the idea comes from, what the Oedipus complex actually claims, how the id, ego and superego fit together, and why Popper called psychoanalysis unscientific while Freud’s vocabulary conquered the world.

“Life is opinion”, the obstacle that becomes the way, “never beginning to live”: the most famous Marcus Aurelius quotes with their exact place in the Meditations, what they mean in context, how they get misread, and which viral lines he never wrote.