Philosophical Dictionary

Explore how Dante condemned Epicurus to hell for his materialist philosophy and how this suppression might have delayed scientific progress. This witty essay contrasts Epicurean atomism with Platonic dualism and traces how Christian dogma replaced ancient philosophical pluralism.

In which we discuss epistemology in the terms of Socrates and his final dialogue, the Apology. What do we know? How do we know it? We touch on this from the context of the founder of Western philosophy.

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 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?