Philosophical Dictionary

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 logic meme, an explorer finally finds the Scroll of Truth and throws it away, because it is a truth table. Aristotle founded formal logic without ever drawing one, the Stoics built the logic of “if”, Boole turned it into 0 and 1, and Frege’s system broke on a letter. So who drew the first truth table?

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?

“Why can’t you just be normal?” Socrates, in the meme, screams back: define normal. He asked questions like that all day, unpaid, and they got him into trouble. Wittgenstein doubted that we need definitions at all, yet health systems and diagnostic manuals depend on them. Who gets to say what normal means?