Philosophical Dictionary

The meme has Plato lying back with a cigar after winning arguments against his made-up characters. Many of those characters were real people, and Plato does not always let Socrates win. So what is the Socratic method, why did Socrates call it midwifery, and does it still work once you leave the dialogue?

Socrates memes keep returning to two scenes: a trial for corrupting the youth of Athens and a cup of poison in a prison cell. We read the charge in Plato’s Apology, the death in the Phaedo and Jacques-Louis David’s famous painting, then check the memes against them. How much did the internet get right?

“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?

The meme follows a dinosaur through a chicken to a dino nugget and finds a trace of the true self in the false one. Sartre thought even the search for a true self could be bad faith, his name for dodging freedom. The phrase “false self” comes from a psychoanalyst. So does the nugget still have a true self, and do you?

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?