It is a time of great confusion. The Platonic Republic, seat of wisdom and justice in the galaxy, has fallen and given way to the evil Analytic Empire, whose army of logicians seeks to dominate and control every rival philosophy by means of an exhaustive set of necessary and sufficient conditions. One by one, the old philosophical systems begin to fall or are assimilated by the new regime as a series of deductively valid arguments. Our story begins with a pair of ancient robots, the quirky and pedantic A-3TO and the loveable but eccentric Plato-D2, whose philosophies have come under sustained and brutal attack (they are, in case you hadn’t already realised, cybernetic re-embodiments of two rather similarly named and equally ancient Earthly philosophers)… Lo and behold the evil Dark Lord himself is one of the boarding party!

After a lot of mucking about that I won’t go into right now, our friends escape, which is just as well considering that they are carrying a secret message for a mysterious hermit known only as Socratease Kenobi (or ‘Bob’ to his friends), who has been hiding out in a remote cave for years, watching the shadows on the walls. The message turns out to be a plea for help from a beautiful and mysterious Princess with a strange hairdo, who is the leader of a group of Rebel philosophers aiming to restore truth and freedom of thought to the galaxy, and finishes (somewhat enigmatically) with the words “Help me, Socratease, you’re my only hope!”. Upon hearing this, Socratease and a young gardener named Ludwig Starthinker realise that their time has come — they must act swiftly to save the university from the forces of darkness…

With the help of two predicate smugglers, Karl Marxo and his hairy but incomprehensible friend, Chewbacon, the companions set off in their spaceship, the Phenomenological Reduction, to confront the Dark Lord and, ultimately, to bring down the Empire once and for all… Unfortunately, they get a lot more than they bargained for, partly because they failed to pay much attention during logic classes and find all the funny symbols a bit confusing, but mostly because the Empire is building a secret weapon that is rumoured to be even more powerful than reductio ad absurdum, so fiendishly destructive that it threatens to undermine the very foundations of philosophy as we know it!

Will Ludwig have what it takes to outsmart the Empire and categorically disprove this new weapon once and for all, or will he be — how shall I put it? — all saying and no showing? Find out in the next thrilling episode of PHILOSOPHY WARS…