Philosophical Dictionary

Kierkegaard is famous for the leap of faith and for saying truth is subjectivity. One phrase never appears in his published works, and the other belongs to a pseudonym who writes about Christian faith without claiming it. What did Kierkegaard mean by faith, and why does the knight of faith look like a tax collector?

A meme claims absurdists are nihilists who fell for their captor. Nietzsche’s notebooks split nihilism into a weary kind and a destructive kind, Camus warned that the absurd can make murder look indifferent, and Stockholm syndrome itself is a contested label. Is the joke unfair, or does it land a real hit?

Epicurus told his students that death is nothing to us: while we exist, death is not here, and when it comes, we are gone. Lucretius added a mirror argument, Thomas Nagel objected, and Epicurus faced his own death with a letter about a happy day. Does the argument hold, and what did he mean by pleasure?

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?