Philosophical Dictionary

“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?

Max Stirner said your head is haunted. God, morality, the state and even truth can become spooks, fixed ideas that give orders. Here is what a spook is, why Stirner called the pious fools in a madhouse, what his egoism means and why Marx and Engels wrote 300 pages against him. Was he right, or just haunted differently?

Is the dog a good boy? Depends on your ethical theory, says the meme. Nietzsche went further in 1873: truth itself is a mobile army of metaphors, and being truthful means lying by convention. He never published the essay, and his famous “no facts” line sits in a notebook. So did he hand us post-truth?

The “existence is suffering” meme seals a small leak with the biggest claim in Buddhism. The Buddha’s first sermon, SN 56.11, gives the first noble truth a list that includes not getting what you want, a summary clause most people skip, and three more truths that come with instructions. So what does dukkha mean?

It sounds like a riddle: you can do what you want, but you can’t want what you want. Schopenhauer meant the idea literally, and Einstein found it consoling. We trace the line to the 1839 essay behind it, unpack his theory of will, motive and character, and ask: if you never chose your wants, who is to blame?

Last Thursdayism says the universe was created last Thursday, memories included. It began as a joke about a Victorian naturalist who gave Adam a navel and the earth fossils it never needed. Bertrand Russell turned it into a puzzle about memory. Why can no evidence refute it, and why do we still not believe it?