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Oct 21, 2018 · It asks if there is a deep explanation or universal narrative that would make sense of everything, including us. The second is: “Can I find meaning in life?” It might also be expressed: “What’s the point of my life?” “Does my life matter?” “What kind of life is meaningful?” “How should I live?”
Many major historical figures in philosophy have provided an answer to the question of what, if anything, makes life meaningful, although they typically have not put it in these terms (with such talk having arisen only in the past 250 years or so, on which see Landau 1997).
- Existentialism
- Absurdism
- Religious Existentialism
- Buddhism
Existentialism is an approach to philosophy that focuses on the questions of human existence, including how to live a meaningful life in the face of a meaningless universe. Many thinkers and writers are associated with the movement, including Nietzsche, Simone de Beauvoir, and Fyodor Dostoevsky. But perhaps the most prominent of the 20th-century ex...
Absurdism is a philosophy created by Sartre’s one-time friend and later intellectual rival Albert Camus. It is based on the idea that existence is fundamentally absurd and cannot be fully understood through reason. It is related to, but not the same as, existentialism. Camus argues that absurdityarises when humans try to impose order and meaning on...
While the primary existentialist thinkers were all atheists — Nietzsche raised the alarm on nihilism when he declared “God is dead” — the founder of the school was an extremely religious thinker by the name of Søren Kierkegaard. A Danish philosopher working in the first half of the 19th century, he turned his rather angsty disposition into a major ...
Another religious take can be found in the works of Japanese philosopher Keiji Nishitani. Nishitani studied early existentialism under Martin Heidegger, himself a leading existentialist thinker, but provided a Zen Buddhist approach to many of the same problems the existentialists addressed. Nishitani saw the modern problem of nihilism as everywhere...
Mar 21, 2017 · Thaddeus Metz explains in his Stanford Encyclopedia entry on “The Meaning of Life” that when the topic of the meaning of life comes up, people often pose one of two questions. They ask: “So, what is the meaning of life?” or “What are you talking about?”
- Tatjana Višak
- tatjana.visak@gmail.com
- 2017
Apr 20, 2022 · Some suggest that talk of ‘life’s meaning’ is about: pursuing what is worthy of awe and devotion (Taylor 1989, 3–90); seeking out non-trivial purposes (Trisel 2007), perhaps ones beyond our own happiness; leading a life worth living (Landau 2017, 9–12, 15–16); doing what merits esteem or admiration (Kauppinen 2015; cf. Metz 2001 ...
The Meaning of Life. Daniel Hill argues that without God, life would be meaningless. What is the meaning of ‘the meaning of life’? In analytic philosophy the bearers of meaning have usually been considered to be words, phrases, clauses, and sentences. Hence life itself is not usually considered to be a bearer of meaning, but the word ‘life’ is.
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In this chapter, I undertake a critical analysis of the question of life’s meaning—what it means and what does not count. Furthermore, I carefully distinguish between conceptions of meaning and the concept of meaning, presenting my views on the latter....
