Philosophical Dictionary

Most philosophical problems, Wittgenstein thought, are knots in our language, not puzzles about the world. We explain linguistic confusion, language games, meaning is use and the beetle in a box, from the Tractatus to the Investigations, and ask what his critics asked: is calling a problem confusion a clever dodge?

Albert Ellis said his core idea came from the Stoics, and Aaron Beck’s team traced cognitive therapy back to Zeno. Viktor Frankl developed logotherapy in Vienna and survived four camps; Irvin Yalom turned death, freedom, isolation and meaninglessness into a clinical map. What did therapy borrow, and what did it drop?

In the nothingness meme, the void cuddles Eastern philosophers and beats up Western ones. Leibniz asked why there is something rather than nothing and answered with God, Heidegger found the nothing in anxiety, and Carnap called it nonsense. And is Buddhist emptiness, sunyata, a polite word for nihilism?

A social construct exists because people keep treating it as real: money, borders, marriage, a company. Constructed is not the same as fake, and shouting “social construct” can end an argument without winning it. What did Berger, Searle, Hacking and Butler actually claim, and where does human nature fit in?

Watch a lion eat a deer in a lion documentary and you cheer; watch it in a deer documentary and you look away. Nietzsche built a whole theory of morality on that switch, with lambs, birds of prey, debts and priests. Was he really on the lion’s side, or is the story more complicated than the meme lets on?

One meme sums up three theories of human nature: a feral brute for Hobbes, a cheerful innocent for Rousseau, and a crab in full panic for Freud. The real arguments are stranger. Rousseau never said “noble savage”, and Hobbes thought we lock our doors at night for a reason. Is there an essence of man at all?