Search results
May 15, 2007 · However, it has the disadvantages of being unable to capture the intuitions that meaning in life is essentially good for its own sake (Landau 2017, 12–15), that it is not logically contradictory to maintain that an ineffable condition is what confers meaning on life (as per Cooper 2003, 126–42; Bennett-Hunter 2014; Waghorn 2014), and that often human actions themselves (as distinct from an ...
- 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.Apr 20, 2022 · Thaddeus Metz is a Professor of Philosophy at the University of Pretoria, South Africa. His recent publications on life’s meaning include God, Soul and the Meaning of Life (Cambridge University Press, 2019), ‘The Meaning of Life’ in T. Crane and E. Mason, eds., Routledge Encyclopedia of Philosophy (2020), and ‘Supernaturalist Analytic Existentialism’ (International Journal for ...
May 15, 2007 · 1. The Meaning of “Meaning”. One part of the field of life's meaning consists of the systematic attempt to clarify what people mean when they ask in virtue of what life has meaning. This section addresses different accounts of the sense of talk of “life's meaning” (and of “significance,” “importance,” and other synonyms).
In the Judaic worldview, the meaning of life is to elevate the physical world ('Olam HaZeh') and prepare it for the world to come (' Olam HaBa '), the messianic era. This is called Tikkun Olam ("Fixing the World"). Olam HaBa can also mean the spiritual afterlife, and there is debate concerning the eschatological order.
Nov 6, 2017 · We begin by defining the meaning-in-life construct and discussing various ways in which it has been measured, continue with a discussion of the empirical relationships between hope and meaning, and conclude with a theoretical exploration of hope in the context of existential philosophical systems.
People also ask
What is meaning in life?
What is life's meaning?
Who wrote the meaning of life?
Does a person's life have a meaning?
What makes a life meaningful?
What does the existentialist look for in life?
questions. The problem of the meaning of life is one among many fundamen tal issues which the philosophers raise. We can come to a much better perspec tive on the question of the meaning of life if we can place it in the larger context of other fundamental questions. The expression "fundamental question" might appropriately have two meanings.
