Philosophical Dictionary

Nietzsche really titled his chapters “Why I Am So Wise” and “Why I Write Such Good Books”. Ecce Homo was finished just before his collapse and kept from readers for nearly twenty years. Its title quotes Pilate at the trial of Jesus. So was he joking or losing his mind? And which famous quotes did he never write?

The Seneca meme shows a man practising voluntary discomfort, then sleeping on a pile of cash. An accuser in Tacitus put Seneca’s fortune at 300 million sesterces, and Seneca himself admitted the gap between his words and his life. Nietzsche accused them of a fraud of words. Does any of that make Seneca wrong?

A kid pokes his head through a fridge shelf and announces he is Foucault. The joke works because Discipline and Punish really does ask why prisons resemble schools, barracks and hospitals, and why they all resemble prisons. Foucault also flipped Plato: the soul is the prison of the body. Did he see bars everywhere?

The Plato’s cave meme turns the feed into a cave: internet users chained, algorithms casting shadows, one guy who logs off. Plato’s own text has a prize for predicting the shadows, Nietzsche’s abyss line begins with monsters, and filtered selfies made the shadow personal. So is leaving the cave enough?

Philosophy started in the marketplace: Socrates talked to anyone who would answer and Diogenes ate in the agora. Plato’s Academy gave us the word “academic”, the Stoics named a school after a public porch, and philosophy cafés pulled it back onto the street. So who does it better, and is the degree worth the money?

The Agent Smith meme borrows the punchline of a 2016 comic: anyone who criticises a system while living inside it must be a hypocrite. Economists have measured the urge to keep things as they are since 1988, and the theorist whose book appears in the film found it embarrassing. Is the gotcha clever, or loss aversion?