Philosophical Dictionary

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?

A quote card about someone who asks for nothing but your company, then a stick figure demanding a factory. We explain the meme, then what Marx actually meant by owning the means of production, why your toothbrush was never at risk, and what he thought of worker co-ops. So would Marx really want your company?

A pumpkin carved with “inferring causation from correlation” is a statistician’s idea of horror. David Hume argued we do not even see causes, only one thing following another. Yet Doll and Hill linked smoking to lung cancer without an experiment. So how does science get from correlation to causation at all?

It is the most famous formula in philosophy class, and Hegel never used it for his own method. We trace thesis, antithesis, synthesis back to Kant, Fichte and a forgotten popularizer, then show how Hegel’s dialectic actually works, from being and nothing to freedom and love. So why does the wrong version stick?

“Death is the most certain possibility” travels as a Heidegger quote on a cigarette pack. Being and Time puts it differently, and the difference matters: what it means to live towards your own death, why everyday talk of “one dies” hides it, and why Sartre and Camus refused to follow. Who had the better answer?