About this topic
Summary This broad-ranging category covers philosophical explorations of the old question of the meaning of life as well as the more recent rephrasing of the question as that of meaning in life or meaningfulness. Questions range from the idea of a purpose to life, existence or the universe, to the idea that lives can be more or less meaningful. Other questions explored include the relation between meaning and happiness, meaning and morality, meaning in a secular age, meaning in a naturalistic world, and the conditions of meaningfulness.
Key works — Classics: Camus 1957; Frankl 1959; Nagel 1971; Nagel 1986; Nozick 1981; Nozick 1990; Singer 1996; Taylor 1970 — Recent work: Metz 2013; Wielenberg 2005; Wolf 2010; Wolf 2014; Wolf 1997; Wolf 1997
Introductions — Collections/Readers: Benatar 2010; Klemke & Cahn 2008; Seachris 2012 — Philosophical introductions/histories: Baggini 2005; Cottingham 2002; Metz 2021; Young 2003
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722 found
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1 — 50 / 722
  1. Mental Evolution and the Universal Meaning of Life.Gregor Flock - manuscript
    Is a universal meaning of life (MoL) possible? In this paper I argue for an affirmative answer: Starting out from the MoL's initial definition as "the active and successful pursuit of the ultimate end in life (UEiL)" and another initial definition of the UEiL, I first introduce four UEiL and MoL categories. In the context of their discussion, I add the elements of non-physical relation and universal scope to the definitions of UEiL and MoL (sect. 2). After those more general (...)
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  2. The Simulation Hypothesis, Social Knowledge, and a Meaningful Life.Grace Helton - manuscript
    (Draft of Feb 2023, see upcoming issue for Chalmers' reply) In Reality+: Virtual Worlds and the Problems of Philosophy, David Chalmers argues, among other things, that: if we are living in a full-scale simulation, we would still enjoy broad swathes of knowledge about non-psychological entities, such as atoms and shrubs; and, our lives might still be deeply meaningful. Chalmers views these claims as at least weakly connected: The former claim helps forestall a concern that if objects in the simulation are (...)
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  3. Welfare, Meaning, and Worth.Aaron Smuts - manuscript
    The central thesis of this book is that there is more to what makes a life worth living than welfare. I argue that the notion of worth captures matters of importance that no plausible theory of welfare can account for. Worth is best thought of as a higher-level kind of value. I defend an objective list theory (OLT) of worth¬—lives worth living are net high in various objective goods. Not only do I defend an list of some of the goods, (...)
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  4. A Life Worth Living.Aaron Smuts - manuscript
    Theories of well-being tell us what makes a life good for the one who lives it. But there is more to what makes a life worth living than just well-being. We care about the worth of our lives, and we are right to do so. I defend an objective list theory of the worth of a life: The most worthwhile lives are those high in various objective goods. These principally include welfare and meaning. By distinguishing between worth and welfare, we (...)
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  5. On the Road to Meaning.Attila Tanyi - manuscript
    The paper offers a philosophically infused analysis of Cormac McCarthy’s The Road. The main idea is that McCarthy’s novel is primarily a statement on the meaning of life. Once this idea is argued for and endorsed, by using a parallel between The Road and a 19th century Hungarian dramatic poem, The Tragedy of Man, the paper goes on to argue that the most plausible – although admittedly not the only possible – interpretation of The Road is that it advocates a (...)
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  6. Constituents of meaningful life according to J. Cottingham.Amir Abbas Alizamani & Mehdi Ghaforiyan - forthcoming - Philosophical Investigations.
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  7. In Defense of the Post-Work Future: Withdrawal and the Ludic Life.John Danaher - forthcoming - In Michael Cholbi & Michael Weber (eds.), The Future of Work, Technology, and Basic Income. New York: Routledge. pp. 99-116.
    A basic income might be able to correct for the income related losses of unemployment, but what about the meaning/purpose related losses? For better or worse, many people derive meaning and fulfillment from the jobs they do; if their jobs are taken away, they lose this source of meaning. If we are about the enter an era of rampant job loss as a result of advances in technology, is there a danger that it will also be an era of rampant (...)
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  8. Virtual Reality and the Meaning of Life.John Danaher - forthcoming - In Oxford Handbook on Meaning in Life.
    It is commonly assumed that a virtual life would be less meaningful (perhaps even meaningless). As virtual reality technologies develop and become more integrated into our everyday lives, this poses a challenge for those that care about meaning in life. In this chapter, it is argued that the common assumption about meaninglessness and virtuality is mistaken. After clarifying the distinction between two different visions of virtual reality, four arguments are presented for thinking that meaning is possible in virtual reality. Following (...)
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  9. The Self and the Ontic Trust: Toward Technologies of Care and Meaning.Tim Gorichanaz - forthcoming - Journal of Information, Communication and Ethics in Society 17 (3).
    Purpose – Contemporary technology has been implicated in the rise of perfectionism, a personality trait that is associated with depression, suicide and other ills. is paper explores how technology can be developed to promote an alternative to perfectionism, which is a self- constructionist ethic. Design/methodology/approach – is paper takes the form of a philosophical discussion. A conceptual framework is developed by connecting the literature on perfectionism and personal meaning with discussions in information ethics on the self, the ontic trust and (...)
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  10. Moral Identity Predicts the Development of Presence of Meaning during Emerging Adulthood.Hyemin Han, Indrawati Liauw & Ashley Floyd Kuntz - forthcoming - Emerging Adulthood.
    We examined change over time in the relationship between moral identity and presence of meaning during early adulthood. Moral identity refers to a sense of morality and moral values that are central to one’s identity. Presence of meaning refers to the belief that one’s existence has meaning, purpose, and value. Participants responded to questions on moral identity and presence of meaning in their senior year of high school and two years after. Mixed effects model analyses were used to examine how (...)
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  11. Meaningfulness and Importance.Guy Kahane - forthcoming - In Iddo Landau (ed.), The Oxford Handbook of Meaning in Life.
    Some lives are more meaningful than others. Some lives are more important than others. What is the relationship between meaning in life and importance? Because both can be described as relating to significance, the two are often conflated. But these are rather different concepts and the meaningful and the important can easily come apart. They do, however, interact in important ways. When importance also meets the conditions for meaningfulness, it amplifies it, and importance on a large scale is a key, (...)
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  12. The Benefits of Living Without Meaning Sub Specie Aeternitatis.Peter Kügler - forthcoming - Journal of Value Inquiry:1-16.
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  13. How consciousness creates life-meaning.Asha Lancaster-Thomas - forthcoming - Philosophical Psychology.
    This book is about the meaning of life, which is clearly one of the of the most important – if not the most important – topics one could write about. In Understanding Human Conduct, Sam S. Rakover...
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  14. Meaning in Life and the Nature of Time.Ned Markosian - forthcoming - In The Oxford Handbook of Meaning in Life. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
    Many of the leading accounts of what makes a life meaningful are goal-based theories, according to which it is the pursuit of some specific goal (such as love for things that are worthy of love) that gives meaning to our lives. In this chapter I consider how these goal-based theories of meaning in life interact with the two main theories of the nature of time that have been defended in the recent metaphysics literature, namely, The Dynamic Theory of Time and (...)
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  15. How African Conceptions of the Afterlife Bear on Life’s Meaning.Thaddeus Metz - forthcoming - In Ada Agada, Aribiah Attoe & Jonathan Chimakonam (eds.), Emerging Trends and Questions in African Philosophy of Religion.
    Up to now, nearly all the work in the religious philosophy of life’s meaning and the axiology of theism has presumed a conception of an afterlife that is Abrahamic. In contrast, in this article I critically discuss some of the desirable and undesirable facets of Traditional African Religion’s salient conceptions of the afterlife as they bear on meaning in life. Given an interest in a maximally meaningful life, and supposing meaning would come from living beyond the death of this body, (...)
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  16. Medicine and the Meaning of Life (tentative title).Thaddeus Metz - forthcoming - In Alex Broadbent (ed.), Oxford Handbook of Philosophy of Medicine. Oxford University Press.
    Insofar as value theory is relevant to the philosophy of medicine, two goods have dominated reflection: well-being (particularly health) and morality. This essay casts doubt on whether those values are sufficient to resolve an array of important debates about medical practice, maintaining that the value of what makes a life meaningful should play a much larger role. After first indicating how meaningfulness differs from happiness and rightness, the essay argues that meaningfulness cannot reasonably be ignored when thinking comprehensively about the (...)
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  17. Die Pest in Zeiten von Corona – Philosophie und Literatur bei Albert Camus.Nicola Mößner - forthcoming - Philokles.
  18. Camus' Challenge: The Question of Suicide (Is life worth living).Kathleen O'Dwyer - forthcoming - Journal of Humanistic Psychology.
    In the opening essay of The Myth of Sisyphus and Other Essays, Camus states that ‘There is but one truly serious philosophical problem, and that is suicide. Judging whether life is or is not worth living amounts to answering the fundamental question of philosophy’ (Camus, 2005: 1). He argues that all the other questions of philosophy, dealing with truth, knowledge, ethics, science, language and so on, are necessarily secondary to this question: ‘I therefore conclude that the meaning of life is (...)
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  19. Meaningful Work and Achievement in Increasingly Automated Workplaces.W. Jared Parmer - forthcoming - The Journal of Ethics.
    As automating technologies are increasingly integrated into workplaces, one concern is that many of the human workers who remain will be relegated to more dull and less positively impactful work. This paper considers two rival theories of meaningful work that might be used to evaluate particular implementations of automation. The first is achievementism, which says that work that culminates in achievements to workers’ credit is especially meaningful; the other is the practice view, which says that work that takes the form (...)
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  20. Living with Absurdity: A Nobleman’s Guide.Ryan Preston-Roedder - forthcoming - Philosophy and Phenomenological Research.
    In A Confession, a memoir of his philosophical midlife crisis, Tolstoy recounts falling into despair after coming to believe that his life, and for that matter all human life, is meaningless and absurd. Although Tolstoy’s account of the origin and phenomenology of his crisis is widely regarded as illuminating, his response to the crisis – namely, embracing a religious tradition that he had previously dismissed as “irrational,” “incomprehensible,” and “mingled with falsehood” – seems unpromising, at best. Nevertheless, I argue, Tolstoy’s (...)
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  21. Schopenhauer's Pessimism.Byron Simmons - forthcoming - In David Bather Woods & Timothy Stoll (eds.), The Schopenhauerian Mind. Routledge.
    Optimism and pessimism are two diametrically opposed views about the value of existence. Optimists maintain that existence is better than non-existence, while pessimists hold that it is worse. Arthur Schopenhauer put forward a variety of arguments against optimism and for pessimism. I will offer a synoptic reading of these arguments, which aims to show that while Schopenhauer’s case against optimism primarily focuses on the value or disvalue of life’s contents, his case for pessimism focuses on the ways in which life (...)
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  22. On the Subjective Value of Life.Ognjen Arandjelović - 2023 - Philosophies 8 (2):23.
    Claims (or the implicit assumption of the inherent worth of life) are pervasive and remain virtually unchallenged. I have already argued that these outright moral dictates are thinly veiled vestiges of theological ethics which, following the removal of their theological foundations, remain little more than nebulous claims supported only by fear of the consequences of a challenge. In my previous work, I rejected an a priori claim of an objective life’s worth, which is the worth that we should assign to (...)
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  23. How African Conceptions of God Bear on Life's Meaning.Thaddeus Metz - 2023 - Religious Studies 59 (2):340-354.
    Up to now, a very large majority of work in the religious philosophy of life’s meaning has presumed a conception of God that is Abrahamic. In contrast, in this essay I critically discuss some of the desirable and undesirable facets of Traditional African Religion’s salient conceptions of God as they bear on meaning in life. Given an interest in a maximally meaningful life, and supposing meaning would come from fulfiling God’s purpose for us, would it be reasonable to prefer God (...)
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  24. Are Lives Worth Creating? (Repr.).Thaddeus Metz - 2023 - In Contemporary Anti-Natalism. Routledge. pp. 20-33.
    Reprint of a 2011 article about David Benatar's approach to anti-natalism in a collection of essays devoted to his and other forms of anti-natalism.
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  25. What Makes Life Meaningful? A Debate.Thaddeus Metz & Joshua Seachris - 2023 - Routledge.
    What does talk about life’s meaning even mean? Can human life be meaningful? What is God’s role, if any, in a meaningful life? These three questions frame this one-of-a-kind debate between two philosophers who have spent most of their professional lives thinking and writing about the topic of life’s meaning. In this wide-ranging scholarly conversation, Professors Thaddeus Metz and Joshua Seachris develop and defend their own unique answers to these questions, while responding to each other’s objections in a lively dialogue (...)
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  26. Desire and Meaning in Life: Towards a Theory.Nomy Arpaly - 2022 - In Iddo Landau (ed.), Oxford Handbook of Meaning in Life. Oxford University Press.
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  27. Kötülük Problemi ve Tanrı: Felsefi Bir İnceleme.Hasan G. Bahçekapili - 2022 - Ankara, Turkey: Nobel Akademik Yayıncılık.
    “Dünyadaki kötülüklerin varlığı, geleneksel teizmdeki Tanrı inancı için bir problem oluşturur mu?” 2000 yıldan fazla zamandır çok çeşitli geleneklerden gelen düşünürleri meşgul eden bu çetrefilli soruya bu kitap, en güncel tartışmalardan hareketle cevap vermeye çalışıyor. Kötülük probleminin tarihsel gelişimini, mantıksal ve delilci kötülük argümanlarını özetledikten sonra kitap, geleneksel ve modern teist çözüm önerilerini ele alıyor: Özgür iradenin varlığı veya manevi gelişim potansiyeli, kötülüklerin varlığını meşru hâle getirir mi? Etrafımızda gördüğümüz kötülüklerin gerekçesi konusunda şüpheci tavır takınıp Tanrı'nın hikmetinin, insanın kısıtlı zihni (...)
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  28. The Desperate Search for Meaning in Life.Heather Browning & Walter Veit - 2022 - In Neon Genesis Evangelion and Philosophy. Chicago, Illinois: Carus Books.. pp. 3-12.
  29. The Rationality of Suicide and the Meaningfulness of Life.Michael Cholbi - 2022 - In Iddo Landau (ed.), Oxford Handbook of Meaning in Life. Oxford University Press. pp. 445-460.
    A wide body of psychological research corroborates the claim that whether one’s life is (or will be) meaningful appears relevant to whether it is rational to continue living. This article advances conceptions of life’s meaningfulness and of suicidal choice with an eye to ascertaining how the former might provide justificatory reasons relevant to the latter. Drawing upon the recent theory of meaningfulness defended by Cheshire Calhoun, the decision to engage in suicide can be understood as a choice related to life’s (...)
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  30. Kant, Liberalism, and the Meaning of Life.Jeffrey Church - 2022 - Oxford: Oxford University Press.
    In the wake of populist challenges throughout the past decade in the U.S. and Europe, liberalism has been described as elitist and out of touch, concerned with protecting and promoting material interests with an orientation that is pragmatic, legalistic, and technocratic. Simultaneously, liberal governments have become increasingly detached from the middle class and its moral needs for purpose and belonging. If liberalism cannot provide spiritual sustenance, individuals will look elsewhere for it, especially in illiberal forms of populism. -/- In Kant, (...)
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  31. Death, Immortality, and Meaning in Life: Precis and Further Reflections.John Martin Fischer - 2022 - The Journal of Ethics 26 (3):341-359.
    I offer an overview of the book, _Death, Immortality, and Meaning in Life_, summarizing the main issues, arguments, and conclusions (Fischer 2020). I also present some new ideas and further developments of the material in the book. A big part of this essay is drawing connections between the specific issues treated in the book and those in other areas of philosophy, and in particular, the theory of agency and moral responsibility. I highlight some striking similarities of both structure and content (...)
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  32. Permanent Value.Christopher Frugé - 2022 - Journal of the American Philosophical Association 8 (2):356-372.
    Temporal nihilism is the view that our lives won’t matter after we die. According to the standard interpretation, this is because our lives won’t make a permanent difference. Many who consider the view thus reject it by denying that our lives need to have an eternal impact. However, in this paper, I develop a different formulation of temporal nihilism revolving around the persistence of personal value itself. According to this stronger version, we do not have personal value after death, so (...)
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  33. A puzzle about meaning and luck.Matthew Hammerton - 2022 - Ratio 35 (2):123-132.
    This article raises a puzzle about luck and meaning in life. The puzzle shows that, in certain cases involving luck, standard intuitions about the meaningfulness of various lives conflict with basic theoretical assumptions about the nature of meaning. After setting out the puzzle, several options for resolving it are developed and evaluated.
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  34. Well-Being and Meaning in Life.Matthew Hammerton - 2022 - Canadian Journal of Philosophy 52 (5):573-587.
    Many philosophers now see meaning in life as a key evaluative category that stands alongside well-being and moral goodness. Our lives are assessed not only by how well they go for us and how morally good they are, but also by their meaningfulness. In this article, I raise a challenge to this view. Theories of meaning in life closely resemble theories of well-being, and there is a suspicion that the former collapse into the latter. I develop this challenge showing that (...)
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  35. Having the Meaning of Life in View.Ulf Hlobil - 2022 - In Christian Kietzmann (ed.), Teleological Structures in Human Life: Essays for Anselm W. Müller. New York: Routledge.
    The paper aims to clarify the role of the meaning of life in Anselm Müller’s philosophy. Müller says that the ethically good life is the life of acting well, and acting well requires at least a rough conception of the meaning of life, or a conception of what makes a life go well. But why is such a conception required and what does it mean to have such a conception? I argue that such a conception cannot provide us with ultimate (...)
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  36. Is the Universe Indifferent? Should We Care.Guy Kahane - 2022 - Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 104 (3):676-695.
    Philosophy and Phenomenological Research, Volume 104, Issue 3, Page 676-695, May 2022.
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  37. The Experience of Meaning.Antti Kauppinen - 2022 - In Iddo Landau (ed.), The Oxford Handbook of Meaning in Life.
    Recently, psychologists have started to distinguish between three kinds of experience of meaning. Drawing on philosophical as well as empirical literature, I argue that the experience of one’s own life making sense involves a sense of narrative justification, so that not just any kind of intelligibility suffices; the experience of purpose includes enthusiastic future-directed motivation against the background of a global sort of hopefulness, or the resonance of what one does right now with one’s values; and finally, the experience of (...)
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  38. God’s Goodness, Divine Purpose, and the Meaning of Life.Jeremy Koons - 2022 - European Journal for Philosophy of Religion 14 (2).
    The divine purpose theory —according to which that human life is meaningful to the extent that it fulfills some purpose or plan to which God has directed us—encounters well-known Euthyphro problems. Some theists attempt to avoid these problems by appealing to God’s essential goodness, à la the modified divine command theory of Adams and Alston. However, recent criticisms of the modified DCT show its conception of God’s goodness to be incoherent; and these criticisms can be shown to present an analogous (...)
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  39. Philosophy and the meaning of life.William Lyons - 2022 - Think 21 (60):33-49.
    The author sets out to respond to the student complaint that ‘Philosophy did not answer “the big questions”’, in particular the question ‘What is the meaning of life?’ The response first outlines and evaluates the most common religious answer, that human life is given a meaning by God who created us and informs us that this life is just the pilgrim way to the next eternal life in heaven. He then discusses the response that, from the point of view of (...)
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  40. Knowledge, Freedom and the Meaning of Life according to Herbert McCabe.Franco Manni - 2022 - New Blackfriars 103 (1104):309-316.
    New Blackfriars, Volume 103, Issue 1104, Page 309-316, March 2022.
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  41. Meaning in the Pursuit of Pleasure.David Matheson - 2022 - Journal of the American Philosophical Association 8 (3):552-566.
    Here I speak in favor of the view that life's meaning can be found in the pursuit of pleasure. I first present an argument for this view that is grounded in a traditional concept of meaning. To help ease remaining concerns about accepting it, I then draw attention to four things the view does not imply: (1) that we have a reason to take hedonistic theories of meaning seriously; (2) that meaning can be found in the deeply immoral, the deeply (...)
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  42. Problems of Living Meaningfully in Psychiatry and Philosophy.Thaddeus Metz - 2022 - Brazilian Journal of Psychiatry 44 (3):229-230.
    A brief critical notice of Dan J Stein's new book _Problems of Living: Perspectives from Philosophy, Psychiatry, and Cognitive-Affective Science_.
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  43. The Concept of Life's Meaning.Thaddeus Metz - 2022 - In Iddo Landau (ed.), Oxford Handbook of Meaning in Life. Oxford University Press. pp. 27-42.
    I critically discuss views about what at least analytic philosophers have in mind when reflecting on what makes life meaningful. I first demonstrate that there has been a standard view of that, according to which meaningfulness centrally involves the actions of human persons, ones that exhibit a high desirability characteristically present in ‘the good, the true, and the beautiful’ and absent from the cases of Sisyphus or the Experience Machine. Then, I address five challenges to the standard view that have (...)
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  44. Does the Lack of Cosmic Meaning Make Our Lives Bad?Thaddeus Metz - 2022 - Journal of Value Inquiry 56 (1):37-50.
    This article is part of a special issue devoted to David Benatar’s anti-natalism. There are places in his oeuvre where he contends that, while our lives might be able to exhibit some terrestrial or human meaning, that is not enough to make them worth creating, which would require a cosmic meaning that is unavailable to us. There are those who maintain, in reply to Benatar, that some of our lives do have a cosmic meaning, but I argue that Benatar is (...)
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  45. Meaning and Anti-Meaning in Life.Sven Nyholm & Stephen M. Campbell - 2022 - In Iddo Landau (ed.), The Oxford Handbook of Meaning in Life. Oxford University Press. pp. 277-91.
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  46. Nothing Personal: On the Limits of the Impersonal Temperament in Ethics.Nicholas Smyth - 2022 - Journal of Value Inquiry 56 (1):67-83.
    David Benatar has argued both for anti-natalism and for a certain pessimism about life's meaning. In this paper, I propose that these positions are expressions of a deeply impersonal philosophical temperament. This is not a problem on its own; we all have our philosophical instincts. The problem is that this particular temperament, I argue, leads Benatar astray, since it prevents him from answering a question that any moral philosopher must answer. This is the question of rational authority, which requires the (...)
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  47. Constraint-Free Meaning, Fearing Death, and Temporal Bias.Travis Timmerman - 2022 - The Journal of Ethics 26 (3):377-393.
    This paper focuses on three distinct issues in Fischer’s Death, Immortality, and Meaning in Life, viz. meaning in life, fearing death, and asymmetrical attitudes between our prenatal and postmortem non-existence. I first raise the possibility that life’s total meaning can be negative and argue that immoral or harmful acts are plausibly meaning-detracting acts, which could make the lives of historically impactful evil dictators anti-meaningful. After that, I review Fischer’s two necessary conditions for meaning in life and argue against each. In (...)
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  48. Don’t Worry, Be Happy: The Gettability of Ultimate Meaning.Michael-John Turp, Brylea Hollinshead & Stephen Rowe - 2022 - Journal of Controversial Ideas 2 (1).
    Rivka Weinberg advances an error theory of ultimate meaning with three parts: (1) a conceptual analysis, (2) the claim that the extension of the concept is empty, and (3) a proposed fitting response, namely being very, very sad. Weinberg’s conceptual analysis of ultimate meaning involves two features that jointly make it metaphysically impossible, namely (i) the separateness of activities and valued ends, and (ii) the bounded nature of human lives. Both are open to serious challenges. We offer an internalist alternative (...)
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  49. The Pleasures of Tranquillity.Alex Voorhoeve - 2022 - Homo Oeconomicus.
    Epicurus posited that the best life involves the greatest pleasures. He also argued that it involves attaining tranquillity. Many commentators have expressed scepticism that these two claims are compatible. For, they argue, Epicurus’ tranquil life is so austere that it is hard to see how it could be maximally pleasurable. Here, I offer an Epicurean account of the pleasures of tranquillity. I also consider different ways of valuing lives from a hedonistic point of view. Benthamite hedonists value lives by the (...)
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  50. Between Sisyphus's Rock and a Warm and Fuzzy Place: Procreative Ethics and the Meaning of Life.Rivka Weinberg - 2022 - In Iddo Landau (ed.), The Oxford Handbook of Meaning in Life. New York, NY, USA:
    This paper suggests that there are three kinds of meaning: Everyday, Cosmic, and Ultimate. Everyday meaning refers to the value and significance in our everyday lives, including values such as beauty, morality, and truth, and the significance of engagement with them. Cosmic meaning refers to our meaningful role in the cosmos: to the significance and value of our cosmic niche, to the purposes of the cosmos and our place in it. Ultimate meaning is the end-regarding justifying reason, the valued end, (...)
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