Philosophical Dictionary

The second part of the "Philosophy Carol" series in which you are visited by the Spirit of Philosophy Past, glimpsing the history of philosophy while receiving bonks on the head from an ancient tome.

The philosopher meme puts the same caption on two men in Raphael’s School of Athens, one writing, the other copying. Whitehead called European philosophy footnotes to Plato, Aristotle broke with his teacher, and a well-known 2015 paper asked why there is not more progress. So is philosophy going in circles?

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?

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?