1.

The axiomatic approach

This approach requires no philosophical definition of what a point or a line actually
"is", just a list of properties (axioms) that they satisfy. The theorems of geometry are
all statements that can be deduced from these properties. In this approach, the
theorems of geometry are guaranteed to be true no matter what concept of "point" or
"line" is being used and no matter how they are defined, as long as they satisfy the
basic axioms.
Euclid wrote down a list of these axioms: five of them (though actually there are some
other axioms implicit in Euclid's definitions). He called them postulates. The first four
postulates are so self-evident that they clearly ought to be satisfied by anything
worthy of the name "geometry". There are different ways of stating them and I don't
know which you have seen, so I won't list them, but they basically say things like "for
any pair of points, there is a unique line passing through both of them".
However, the fifth postulate isn't quite in the same category. Euclid's version of it was
quite complicated; a simpler, equivalent version says that for any line L and a
point P not on L, there exists a unique line that is parallel to L (never meets L) and
passes through P. For this reason, the fifth postulate is called the parallel postulate.
At first glance it would seem that the parallel postulate ought to be a theorem
deducible from the other more basic postulates, rather than something that has to be
assumed separately. For centuries mathematicians tried to prove it, but always failed.
For example: it follows from Euclid's first four postulates that there is a perpendicular
line segment from P to L. Then you can draw a unique line through P that is
perpendicular to that line segment. In some sense this is parallel to Lbecause the two
angles in the picture below are right angles, but how can one prove from this that this
means the lines never intersect? We know they don't in our familiar mental picture of
what an infinite flat plane looks like, but is that fact alogical necessity deducible from
the other postulates?

Eventually it was discovered that the parallel postulate is logically independent of the
other postulates, and you get a perfectly consistent system even if you assume that
parallel postulate is false. This means that it is possible to assign meanings to the
terms "point" and "line" in such a way that they satisfy the first four postulates but not
the parallel postulate. These are called non-Euclidean geometries. Projective
geometry is not really a typical non-Euclidean geometry, but it can still be treated as
such.
In this axiomatic approach, projective geometry means any collection of things called
"points" and things called "lines" that obey the same first four basic properties that
points and lines in a familiar flat plane do, but which, instead of the parallel postulate,
satisfy the following opposite property instead:
The projective axiom: Any two lines intersect (in exactly one point).
(Depending on how one words the other axioms, they may need some slight
modification too).
Using only this statement, together with the other basic axioms of geometry, one can
prove theorems about projective geometry. Many of them are the same as ordinary
geometry; the big difference is that there is no such thing as a pair of parallel, nonintersecting lines in projective geometry.
One interesting fact is worth mentioning: in projective geometry, points and lines are
completely interchangeable! That is, any statement about points and lines would still
be true even if you replaced all occurrences of the word "point" with the word "line",
and vice versa. For instance, the basic axiom that "for any two points, there is a
unique line that intersects both those points", when turned around, becomes "for any
two lines, there is a unique point that intersects (i.e., lies on) both those lines", which
is the property described above. There is a complete duality between points and lines
in projective geometry.
Now, if this approach were all there was to projective geometry, it would be little
more than an intellectual curiosity. All it means is that it logically consistent for there
to be concepts called "points" and "lines" that satisfy the axioms of geometry with the
projective axiom in place of the parallel postulate. It says nothing about whether such
concepts would be interesting, relevant, or have any relation whatsoever to the normal
concepts of lines and planes in Euclidean geometry.
However, there are other approaches that reveal the connection:

2. Euclidean Geometry Plus A "Line At Infinity"

Another way to approach projective geometry is to define it as follows:

Take each line of ordinary Euclidean geometry and add to it one extra object called a
"point at infinity". Do this in such a way that the same extra object is added to parallel
lines (so that the extended lines now intersect), while different extra objects are added
to non-parallel lines (so that the extended lines don't intersect more than once).
In other words:

To each line l of Euclidean geometry, associate some other object f(l), in such a
way that f(l) = f(l') if and only if l and l' are parallel.
[There are lots of ways to do this. For example, you could let f(l) be the slope
of l (a real number, or the symbol " infinity " if l is vertical). Alternatively, you
could let f(l) be the counterclockwise angle from some fixed reference line to l.
The precise method you use is unimportant.]

The points of projective space are the points in Euclidean geometry together
with these additional objects f(l) (which are called the points at infinity).
The lines of projective space are lines l in Euclidean space together with the
extra object f(l) attached. In addition, the collection of all the extra objects
together is also called a line in projective space (called the line at infinity).

This definition satisfies all the axioms of projective geometry. For example, here's a
proof that any two of these "lines" L and L' intersect in exactly one "point":
If one of L and L' (say, L) is the line at infinity and the other (L') is not, then they
intersect at exactly one point because by definition L' contains exactly one point at
infinity.
If neither L nor L' is the line at infinity, then each of them consists of an ordinary
Euclidean line together with one point at infinity. That is, we can
write

and

where l and l' are Euclidean lines.

If l and l' intersect at a point p then f(l) does not equal f(l') (since f(l) only equals f(l')
when l and l' are parallel), so p is the one and only intersection point of L and L'.
If l and l' do not intersect, then f(l) = f(l') (since l and l' are parallel), so again L and L'
have exactly one intersection point.
This view of projective geometry makes it relatively easy to answer questions of
concurrence and collinearity.

For example, what does a collection of concurrent lines in projective space look like?
It is one of three things:
1. a collection of the projective extensions of lines that were concurrent in
Euclidean space, or
2. a collection of the projective extensions of lines that were parallel in Euclidean
space (but are now concurrent at a point at infinity), or
3. case 2 above together with the line at infinity.
As for collinearity: points that are collinear in Euclidean space are still collinear in
projective space. Also, the points at infinity are all collinear in projective space. A
point p at infinity is only collinear with a collection of finite points if p = f(l)
where l is the Euclidean line through the finite points.
Although this view of projective geometry helps answer your question, it's still a little
artificial, with all this talk of just "adding extra objects at infinity". There are two
other, much more natural, ways of looking at it.

3. Lines In Space
Projective geometry can be thought of as the collection of all lines through the origin
in three-dimensional space. That is, each point of projective geometry is actually
a line through the origin in three-dimensional space. The distance between two points
can be thought of as the angle between the corresponding lines. A line in projective
geometry is really a family of lines through the origin in three-dimensional space.
To see how this ties in with the previous view of projective geometry, let P be a
horizontal plane in space that does not pass through the origin. As can be seen in the
picture below, every line through the origin passes through exactly one point on P,
except for the horizontal lines.

So there is a one-to-one correspondence between the points on the ordinary plane P,

and some of the points in projective space (namely, all non-horizontal lines through
the origin in 3-d space). The remaining points in projective space are horizontal lines
through the origin in 3-d space; these are the "points at infinity".
Now think about a line l in P. This corresponds to a family of lines through the origin
in 3-d space, as shown. As you move to infinity on the line l, the corresponding lines
through the origin actually converge to a horizontal line parallel to l, so this limiting
line should be included in the family.

You can see this explicitly if you look at the direction vectors of the lines. Suppose
that the plane P is at height 1 above the origin in 3-d space, and you have a
line l given by y = mx + b on P. Then a typical point p on l has 3-d coordinates

(x,mx+b, 1). This means that (x, mx+b, 1) is a direction vector for the line through the
origin that passes through p. The unit direction vector is obtained by dividing this
vector by its length, to get

It is an exercise in limits to show that this converges to (1,m,0) as

; in other
words, this family of lines converges to a horizontal line through the origin with
slope m. Notice that the intercept b does not appear in the limit: parallel lines l,l'
in P (ones with the same m and different b) correspond to families of lines through the
origin in 3-d space which converge to the same horizontal line through the origin.
What all this means is that, in projective space, the "line" corresponding to l is
actually a family of lines through the origin consisting of: (1) the lines that pass
through l, and (2) the limiting horizontal line. Using the language in which a line
through the origin in 3-d space is called a "point" in projective space, and a horizontal
one is called a "point at infinity" in projective space: the line in projective space
corresponding to the Euclidean line l on P consists of (1) the points in projective
space that correspond to the points on l, and (2) the point at infinity in projective
space that is parallel to l.
This is the same as what we saw before: lines in projective space consist of lines in
Euclidean space with an added point at infinity. The difference is that now there's a
definite geometric interpretation of the points at infinity. They're not just artificially
added fabrications; rather, they're horizontal lines through the origin in 3-space. The
remaining, non-horizontal lines through the origin in 3-space are in one-to-one
correspondence with the points in a standard Euclidan plane P.

4. A Non-Orientable Surface
There's yet another way to understand projective geometry: it is the geometry of
curves on a rather weird surface. This surface cannot be embedded in the standard 3dimensional world we live in; you'd need to live in 4 dimensions to visualize it
completely. Nevertheless, it has the following fairly easy interpretation: take a sphere
(spheres in mathematics are hollow surfaces, not solid balls), and think of gluing
together all pairs of antipodal points so that they become the same point. (Antipodal
points are those which are on the most opposite part of the sphere from each other.
For instance, if the centre of the sphere is at the origin, then the antipodal point of
(x,y,z) is (-x,-y,-z).)

Another way to think of it is to just take the top hemisphere, and then "seal it up" into
a closed surface by gluing each point on the equator to its opposite point.
Now, if you put a sphere with its centre at the origin in 3-d space, then every line
through the origin passes through exactly 2 antipodal points in the sphere (and
therefore exactly one point in our surface, after those two antipodal points get glued
onto the same spot). So, there is a one-to-one correspondence between points in
projective space (lines through the origin in 3-d space) and points on this weird
surface.
What is a "straight line" on a surface like a sphere or our glued surface? It's not really
straight, obviously, but it can still be defined as giving the shortest distance between
two points. On a sphere, the shortest path between two points is an arc that is part of a
"great circle" on the sphere (one whose centre is the centre of the sphere). So, the
"straight lines" on a sphere are the great circles.
The points on the top hemisphere of the sphere (excluding the equator) correspond to
the points in a standard Euclidean plane as shown in the picture below. The points on
the equator are the "points at infinity". Intersecting lines in the standard Euclidean
plane are great circles that intersect as shown on the sphere:

Parallel lines in the standard Euclidean plane are great circles that intersect only at the
equator, as shown below:

(note that although these great circles intersect in two points, they become the same
point after antipodal points get glued together so it's still true that in projective space,
any two lines intersect in exactly one point).
In summary, then, projective geometry can be thought of as the study of points and
"lines" (great circles) on a surface obtained by gluing the equator of a hemisphere to
itself. It's very similar to the study of points and "lines" (great circles) on a sphere,
except that on a sphere every pair of lines intersects in exactly two (antipodal) points
instead of one.