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Jul 1, 2019 · “Thus far we have shown that the meaning of life always changes, but that it never ceases to be. According to logotherapy, we can discover this meaning in life in three different ways: (1) by creating a work or doing a deed; (2) by experiencing something or encountering someone; and (3) by the attitude we take toward unavoidable suffering.
Jan 8, 2020 · When our awareness intensifies and our senses open up there’s a sense of returning home – to meaning. So what is the meaning of life? Put simply, the meaning of life is life itself.
- The Human Context
- The Contemporary Analytic Context: Prolegomena
- Theories of Meaning in Life
- Death, Futility, and A Meaningful Life
- Underinvestigated Areas
- References and Further Reading
The human desire for meaning finds vivid expression in the stories we tell, diaries we keep, and in our deepest hopes and fears. According to twentieth century Freudian psychoanalyst Bruno Bettelheim, “our greatest need and most difficult achievement is to find meaning in our lives” (Bettelheim 1978: 3). Holocaust survivor and psychiatrist Viktor F...
Relatively speaking, not too long ago many analytic philosophers were suspicious that the question of life’s meaning was incoherent. Such views found expression in popular culture too, for example, in Douglas Adams’ widely read book The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. The story’s central characters visit the legendary planet Magrathea and learn a...
Beyond important preliminary discussions over the nature of the question itself and its constituent parts, one will find competing theories of meaning in life. Here, the debate is over the question of what makes a person’s life meaningful, not over the question of whether there is a cosmic meaning of it all (though, again, some think the two cannot...
Life’s meaning is closely linked with a cluster of related issues including death, futility, and endings in general. These are important themes in the literature on meaning, and are found in a wide array of sources ranging from the Old Testament book of Ecclesiastes to Tolstoy to Camus to contemporary analytic writing on the topic. Worries that dea...
Within value theory, an under-investigated area is how meaning fits within the overall normative landscape. How is it connected, if at all, with ethical, aesthetic, and eudaimonistic value, for example? What sorts of relationships, conceptual, causal or otherwise, exist between the various values? Do some reduce to others? Can profoundly unethical ...
Adams, E. M. “The Meaning of Life.” International Journal for Philosophy of Religion 51 (April 2002): 71-81.Antony, Louise M., ed. Philosophers Without Gods: Meditations on Atheism and the Secular Life. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007.Audi, Robert. “Intrinsic Value and Meaningful Life.” Philosophical Papers 34 (2005): 331-55.Augustine. The Confessions of St. Augustine. Trans. by Rex Warner. New York: Mentor, 1963.However, the person that asks “What is the meaning of life?” is not usually asking for a definition of the word ‘life’. What I think the questioner means to ask is what the explanation is for the presence of life or existence of living things.
- Existentialism. 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.
- Absurdism. 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.
- Religious existentialism. 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.
- Buddhism. 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.
Feb 10, 2021 · 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).
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The meaning of life is not a solution to a problem, but a matter of living in a certain way. It is not metaphysical, but ethical. It is not something separate from life, but what makes it worth p. 95 living – which is to say, a certain quality, depth, abundance, and intensity of life.
