Philosophical Dictionary

Nihilism is the belief life has no objective meaning, not that you can't care about anything. Learn what nihilists actually believe, common misconceptions (it's not depression or immorality), Viktor Frankl's Man's Search for Meaning response, optimistic nihilism, and how it differs from existentialism and absurdism.

Most philosophical problems, Wittgenstein thought, are knots in our language, not puzzles about the world. We explain linguistic confusion, language games, meaning is use and the beetle in a box, from the Tractatus to the Investigations, and ask what his critics asked: is calling a problem confusion a clever dodge?

Albert Ellis said his core idea came from the Stoics, and Aaron Beck’s team traced cognitive therapy back to Zeno. Viktor Frankl developed logotherapy in Vienna and survived four camps; Irvin Yalom turned death, freedom, isolation and meaninglessness into a clinical map. What did therapy borrow, and what did it drop?

“Time is an illusion” is a meme, a Douglas Adams joke and a line pinned on Einstein. Augustine admitted he could not define time, McTaggart tried to prove it unreal, and physics gave us a block universe in which the future may already exist. So is time real, and what did Einstein actually write in 1955?

In the nothingness meme, the void cuddles Eastern philosophers and beats up Western ones. Leibniz asked why there is something rather than nothing and answered with God, Heidegger found the nothing in anxiety, and Carnap called it nonsense. And is Buddhist emptiness, sunyata, a polite word for nihilism?

A social construct exists because people keep treating it as real: money, borders, marriage, a company. Constructed is not the same as fake, and shouting “social construct” can end an argument without winning it. What did Berger, Searle, Hacking and Butler actually claim, and where does human nature fit in?