Philosophical Dictionary

In the split screen meme, Plato sits high and Aristotle sits on the floor, cardboard between their halves of the TV. The joke goes back to Raphael’s School of Athens in the Vatican and two hand gestures. Behind them is a 2,300-year argument about Forms, property and ethics. Who won, and was Plato even Plato?

Absurdism, existentialism and nihilism start from the same uncomfortable silence: the universe does not answer our questions about meaning. Nihilism shrugs, existentialism builds its own meaning, and Camus called the believers’ leap philosophical suicide. So is absurdism just existentialism with good vibes?

Materialism and idealism disagree about what reality is made of, and the fight has run since Plato called it a war of giants and gods. A bishop denied matter, a critic kicked a stone, Marx flipped Hegel upside down. So what do the two camps actually claim, and which side are most philosophers on today?

“Without objective morality, everything is permissible” sounds like a knockout argument, and a sandwich meme made it a joke. The sentence is usually pinned on Dostoevsky, Sartre built existentialism on it, and Nietzsche thought atheists who kept their morals were cheating. Does objective morality need God at all?

A viral line says crushing a cockroach makes you a hero and crushing a butterfly a villain. Nobody can trace it to Rumi, but the question is ancient: the Greeks fused beautiful and good into kalokagathia, Kant made beauty a symbol of morality, and psychologists tested the bias. Do our morals follow our eyes?

In 1990 Gilles Deleuze wrote five pages arguing that Foucault’s disciplinary society was already ending. Prisons and factories were giving way to codes, access cards, endless training and debt. What did he mean by dividuals, why does the panopticon meme get Foucault backwards, and was Deleuze right?