Philosophical Dictionary

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?

“You are conclusion shopping your insane hypothesis.” The meme names confirmation bias, which Francis Bacon described in 1620 and psychologists caught in a 1960 number game. Echo chambers make it worse, and a Nature study found checking false news online can raise belief in it. So what does honest research look like?

A Camus meme puts the absurdist at the switch of the internet’s favourite moral dilemma, with a 1950s coupé bearing down the track. The joke stacks Camus’ question about suicide, Philippa Foot’s runaway tram and the crash that killed him in 1960. What would Camus do at the lever, and who was really at the wheel?

Thomas Szasz called mental illness a myth in 1961, R.D. Laing read madness as a divided self, and a former DSM editor later warned of diagnostic inflation. A 1979 study even asked whether depressed people are sadder but wiser. Which of these claims survived their critics, and which quietly fell apart?