If you’ve ever read a philosophy paper and wondered, “Did they really need that many syllables to say absolutely nothing?”—this book is for you.

Sophia Anne Blackwell, the wildly irreverent creator of the Cogito Ergo Nope! series, returns with her most hilariously scathing book yet: a no-holds-barred takedown of philosophy’s greatest (and most obscurantist) offenders. From the ancient Greeks who invented making things harder than they need to be, to French theorists who turned not making sense into a career, Big Words, Small Ideas traces the glorious tradition of intellectual smoke and mirrors with biting wit and actual clarity.

In these pages, you’ll meet:

Plato, who decided the real world was just a sad knockoff of Ideas That Don’t Exist

Aristotle, who invented philosophical filing cabinets with seventeen drawers too many

Plotinus, who tried to write about the indescribable in several hundred pages

Kant, who made thinking about thinking so hard you’d wish you never started

Hegel, the man who weaponized run-on sentences

Heidegger, who wrote an entire book about Being without explaining what Being means

And a whole cast of modern academics who think obscurity = genius

With ruthless humor, surprising accuracy, and zero patience for jargon masquerading as depth, Blackwell takes you on a tour through the theater of philosophical absurdity—and dares to ask the forbidden question: What the hell are they actually talking about?

Whether you’re a recovering philosophy major, a curious outsider, or just someone who’s tired of pretending to understand Lacan, this book is your guide to 3,000 years of intellectual gaslighting—with jokes.

Individual Philosophers