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  1. Against Seizing the Day.Antti Kauppinen - 2021 - Oxford Studies in Normative Ethics 11:91-111.
    On a widely accepted view, what gives meaning to our lives is success in valuable ground projects. However, philosophers like Kieran Setiya have recently challenged the value of such orientation towards the future, and argued that meaningful living is instead a matter of engaging in atelic activities that are complete in themselves at each moment. This chapter argues that insofar as what is at issue is meaningfulness in its primary existential sense, strongly atelic activities do not suffice for meaning. Instead, (...)
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  • The Need for Others in Public Policy: An African Approach.Thaddeus Metz - 2021 - In Motsamai Molefe & Chris Allsobrook (eds.), Towards an African Political Philosophy of Needs. Palgrave Macmillan. pp. 21-37.
    When reflecting on human need as a moral-political category, it is natural to include some intersubjective conditions. Surely, children need to be socialized, adults need to be recognized, and the poor need to be given certain resources. I point out that there are two different respects in which such intersubjective factors could be considered needs. On the one hand, they might be needed roughly for their own sake, that is, for exemplifying relational values such as caring for others and sharing (...)
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  • Primum Non Nocere Mortuis: Bioethics and the Lives of the Dead.Richard H. Dees - 2019 - Journal of Medicine and Philosophy 44 (6):732-755.
    advanced directivesend-of-life decisionsharming the deadposthumous reproductiontransplant ethics.
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  • The Worthwhileness of Meaningful Lives.David Matheson - 2020 - Philosophia 48 (1):313-324.
    The M → W thesis that a meaningful life must be a worthwhile life follows from an appealing approach to the axiology of life. Yet one of the most prominent voices in the recent philosophy of life literature, Thaddeus Metz, has raised multiple objections to that thesis. With a view to preserving the appeal of the axiological approach from which it follows, I here defend the M → W thesis from Metz’s objections. My defense yields some interesting insights about both (...)
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  • Meaningfulness as Sensefulness.Joshua Lewis Thomas - 2019 - Philosophia 47 (5):1555-1577.
    It is only in the last few decades that analytic philosophers in particular have begun to pay any serious attention to the topic of life’s meaning. Such philosophers, however, do not usually attempt to answer or analyse the traditional question ‘What is the meaning of life?’, but rather the subtly different question ‘What makes a life meaningful?’ and it is generally assumed that the latter can be discussed independently of the former. Nevertheless, this paper will argue that the two questions (...)
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  • Can Only Human Lives Be Meaningful?Joshua Lewis Thomas - 2018 - Philosophical Papers 47 (2):265-297.
    Duncan Purves and Nicolas Delon have argued that one’s life will be meaningful to the extent that one contributes to valuable states of affairs and this contribution is a result of one’s intentional actions. They then argue, contrary to some theorists’ intuitions, that non-human animals are capable of fulfilling these requirements, and that this finding might entail important things for the animal ethics movement. In this paper, I also argue that things besides human beings can have meaningful existences, but I (...)
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  • (9 other versions)The Meaning of Life.Thaddeus Metz - 2012 - In Ed Zalta (ed.), Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy.
    A 3,500 word overview of 21st century Anglo-American philosophical books devoted to the question of what, if anything, would make life meaningful.
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  • Pulling Apart Well-Being at a Time and the Goodness of a Life.Owen C. King - 2018 - Ergo: An Open Access Journal of Philosophy 5:349-370.
    This article argues that a person’s well-being at a time and the goodness of her life are two distinct values. It is commonly accepted as platitudinous that well-being is what makes a life good for the person who lives it. Even philosophers who distinguish between well-being at a time and the goodness of a life still typically assume that increasing a person’s well-being at some particular moment, all else equal, necessarily improves her life on the whole. I develop a precise (...)
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  • Narrative and Meaning in Life.Helena de Bres - 2018 - Journal of Moral Philosophy 15 (5):545-571.
    Many theorists have argued that the meaningfulness of a life is related in some way to the narrative or story that can be told about that life. Relationists claim that a life gains in meaning when a particular set of “narrative relations” obtain between the events that constitute it. Recountists claim that it is the telling of a story about those relations, not the relations themselves, that confers meaning. After identifying problems with existing versions of both of these positions, this (...)
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  • The Ontology of Stories.Atsushi Takada - 2017 - Journal of the Japan Association for Philosophy of Science 44 (1-2):35-53.
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  • Meaning in Life and the Metaphysics of Value.Daan Evers - 2017 - De Ethica 4 (3):27-44.
    According to subjectivist views about a meaningful life, one's life is meaningful in virtue of desire satisfaction or feelings of fulfilment. Standard counterexamples consist of satisfaction found through trivial or immoral tasks. In response to such examples, many philosophers require that the tasks one is devoted to are objectively valuable, or have objectively valuable consequences. I argue that the counterexamples to subjectivism do not require objective value for meaning in life. I also consider other reasons for thinking that meaning in (...)
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  • Mahdollisuus, välttämättömyys ja luodut ikuiset totuudet Descartesin filosofiassa.Forsman Jan - 2016 - In Ilkka Niiniluoto, Tuomas Tahko & Teemu Toppinen (eds.), Mahdollisuus. Helsinki: Philosophical Society of Finland. pp. 120-129.
    Tässä artikkelissa käsittelen Descartesin ikuisten totuuksien välttämättömyyteen liittyvää ongelmaa. Teoksessa Mietiskelyjä ensimmäisestä filosofiasta (1641–1642) Descartes nostaa esiin käsitteen ikuisista totuuksista, käyttäen esimerkkinään kolmiota. Kolmion muuttumattomaan ja ikuiseen luontoon kuuluu esimerkiksi, että sen kolme kulmaa ovat yhteenlaskettuna 180°. Se on totta kolmiosta, vaikka yhtään yksittäistä kolmiota ei olisi koskaan ollutkaan olemassa. Eräät ajattelemieni asioiden piirteet ovat siis Descartesin mukaan ajattelustani riippumattomia. Ikuisia totuuksia ovat ainakin matemaattiset ja geometriset tosiseikat sekä ristiriidan laki. Samoin Descartesin kuuluisa lause “ajattelen, siis olen” lukeutuu ikuisten totuuksien (...)
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  • What Does the Shape of a Life Tell Us About Its Value.Christine Vitrano - 2017 - Journal of Value Inquiry 51 (3):563-575.
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  • Meaning in the lives of humans and other animals.Duncan Purves & Nicolas Delon - 2018 - Philosophical Studies 175 (2):317-338.
    This paper argues that contemporary philosophical literature on meaning in life has important implications for the debate about our obligations to non-human animals. If animal lives can be meaningful, then practices including factory farming and animal research might be morally worse than ethicists have thought. We argue for two theses about meaning in life: that the best account of meaningful lives must take intentional action to be necessary for meaning—an individual’s life has meaning if and only if the individual acts (...)
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  • Pride, Achievement, and Purpose.Antti Kauppinen - 2017 - In Joseph Adam Carter & Emma C. Gordon (eds.), The Moral Psychology of Pride. London: Rowman & Littlefield.
    Pride in our own actions tells a story: we faced a challenge, overcame it, and achieved something praiseworthy. In this paper, I draw on recent psychological literature to distinguish to between two varieties of pride, 'authentic' pride that focuses on particular efforts (like guilt) and 'hubristic' pride that focuses on the whole self (like shame). Achievement pride is fitting when either efforts or traits explain our success in meeting contextually relevant, authoritative, and challenging standards without excessive opportunity cost. When it (...)
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  • Human Extinction, Narrative Ending, and Meaning of Life.Brooke Alan Trisel - 2016 - Journal of Philosophy of Life 6 (1):1-22.
    Some people think that the inevitability of human extinction renders life meaningless. Joshua Seachris has argued that naturalism can be conceptualized as a meta-narrative and that it narrates across important questions of human life, including what is the meaning of life and how life will end. How a narrative ends is important, Seachris argues. In the absence of God, and with knowledge that human extinction is a certainty, is there any way that humanity could be meaningful and have a good (...)
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  • Personal Singularity and the Significance of Life.Amihud Gilead - 2016 - Philosophia 44 (3):775-786.
    The paper proposes to base the notion of the significance of life on the grounds of the singularity of each person as a psychical subject, i.e. personal singularity. No two persons are alike; each one of us, as a person, is intrinsically different from every other person. This personal singularity has a universal significance, namely, it makes a universal difference, whether or not this difference is distinct and acknowledged. Because morality and the significance of a person's life both rely upon (...)
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  • Meaning and More Meaningful. A Modest Measure.Peter Baumann - 2015 - Journal of Philosophy of Life 5 (3):33-49.
    We often describe lives (or parts of lives) as meaningful or as not meaningful. It is also common to characterize them as more or less meaningful. Some lives, we tend to think, are more meaningful than others. But how then can one compare lives with respect to how much meaning they contain? Can one? This paper argues that (i) only a notion of rough equality can be used when comparing different lives with respect to their meaning, and that (ii) the (...)
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  • (1 other version)Assessing Lives, Giving Supernaturalism Its Due, and Capturing Naturalism: Reply to 13 Critics of Meaning in Life (repr.).Thaddeus Metz - 2015 - In Masahiro Morioka (ed.), Reconsidering Meaning in Life: A Philosophical Dialogue with Thaddeus Metz. Journal of Philosophy of Life, Waseda University. pp. 228-278.
    A lengthy reply to 13 critical discussions of _Meaning in Life: An Analytic Study_ collected in an e-book and reprinted from the _Journal of Philosophy of Life_. The contributors are from a variety of philosophical traditions, including the Anglo-American, Continental and East Asian (especially Buddhist and Japanese) ones.
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  • Reconsidering Meaning in Life: A Philosophical Dialogue with Thaddeus Metz.Masahiro Morioka (ed.) - 2015 - Journal of Philosophy of Life, Waseda University.
    An e-book devoted to 13 critical discussions of Thaddeus Metz's book "Meaning in Life: An Analytic Study", with a lengthy reply from the author. -/- Preface Masahiro Morioka i -/- Précis of Meaning in Life: An Analytic Study Thaddeus Metz ii-vi -/- Source and Bearer: Metz on the Pure Part-Life View of Meaning Hasko von Kriegstein 1-18 -/- Fundamentality and Extradimensional Final Value David Matheson 19-32 -/- Meaningful and More Meaningful: A Modest Measure Peter Baumann 33-49 -/- Is Meaning in (...)
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  • Meaningfulness (Routledge Handbook of the Philosophy of Well-Being).Antti Kauppinen - 2015 - In Guy Fletcher (ed.), The Routledge Handbook of Philosophy of Well-Being. New York,: Routledge.
    This paper is an overview of contemporary theories of meaning in life and its relation to well-being.
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  • What's So Great about Experience?Antti Kauppinen - 2015 - Res Philosophica 92 (2):371-388.
    Suppose that our life choices result in unpredictable experiences, as L.A. Paul has recently argued. What does this mean for the possibility of rational prudential choice? Not as much as Paul thinks. First, what’s valuable about experience is its broadly hedonic quality, and empirical studies suggest we tend to significantly overestimate the impact of our choices in this respect. Second, contrary to what Paul suggests, the value of finding out what an outcome is like for us does not suffice to (...)
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  • Atomism and Holism in the Philosophy of Well-being.Jason R. Raibley - 2015 - In Guy Fletcher (ed.), The Routledge Handbook of Philosophy of Well-Being. New York,: Routledge.
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  • Consequentialism about Meaning in Life.Ben Bramble - 2015 - Utilitas 27 (4):445-459.
    What is it for a life to be meaningful? In this article, I defend what I call Consequentialism about Meaning in Life, the view that one's life is meaningful at time t just in case one's surviving at t would be good in some way, and one's life was meaningful considered as a whole just in case the world was made better in some way for one's having existed.
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  • The Proper Aim of Therapy: Subjective Well-Being, Objective Goodness, or a Meaningful Life?Thaddeus Metz - 2018 - In Alexander Batthyany, Pninit Russo-Netzer & Stefan Schulenberg (eds.), Clinical Perspectives on Meaning: Positive and Existential Psychotherapy. Springer. pp. 17-35.
    Therapists and related theorists and practitioners of mental health tend to hold one of two broad views about how to help patients. On the one hand, some maintain that, or at least act as though, the basic point of therapy is to help patients become clear about what they want deep down and to enable them to achieve it by overcoming mental blockages. On the other hand, there are those who contend that the aim of therapy should instead be to (...)
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  • An Improved Whole Life Satisfaction Theory of Happiness.Jussi Suikkanen - 2011 - International Journal of Wellbeing 1 (1):149-166.
    According to the popular Whole Life Satisfaction theories of happiness, an agent is happy when she judges that her life fulfils her ideal life-plan. Fred Feldman has recently argued that such views cannot accommodate the happiness of spontaneous or pre-occupied agents who do not consider how well their lives are going. In this paper, I formulate a new Whole Life Satisfaction theory which can deal with this problem. My proposal is inspired by Michael Smith’s advice-model of desirability. According to it, (...)
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  • Meaning and Happiness.Antti Kauppinen - 2013 - Philosophical Topics 41 (1):161-185.
    What is the relationship between meaning in life and happiness? In psychological research, subjective meaning and happiness are often contrasted with each other. I argue that while the objective meaningfulness of a life is distinct from happiness, subjective or felt meaning is a key constituent of happiness, which is best understood as a multidimensional affective condition. Measures of felt meaning should consequently be included in empirical studies of the causes and correlates of happiness.
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  • (3 other versions)Desire and Meaning in Life: Towards a Theory.Nomy Arpaly - 2022 - In Iddo Landau (ed.), The Oxford Handbook of Meaning in Life. New York: Oxford University Press.
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  • (9 other versions)The Meaning of Life (Second Revised Edition).Thaddeus Metz - 2021 - Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy.
    A 10,000+ word critical overview of analytic philosophy devoted to life's meaning, with some focus on books and more recent works.
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  • (9 other versions)The Meaning of Life.Thaddeus Metz - 2012 - In Ed Zalta (ed.), Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy.
    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. Consider, for instance, Aristotle on the human function, Aquinas on the beatific vision, and Kant on the highest good. While these concepts have some bearing on happiness and morality, they are straightforwardly construed as accounts of which final ends a person ought to realize in order to have a significant existence. (...)
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  • Lucky Idiots and Incompetent Villains: Luck and Responsibility in Meaningful Lives.Chad Mason Stevenson - 2024 - Philosophia 52 (2):417-433.
    What is the relationship between meaning in life and luck? One popular view within the literature is that resultant luck vitiates meaning; that if the relevant state-of-affairs is primarily the result of luck, chance, or happenstance, rather than the person’s actions, then no meaning is conferred. Call this the anti-luck constraint. In this article it is argued that we should reject the anti-luck constraint. Two types of cases, often cited as examples in favour of the anti-luck constraint, are examined: the (...)
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  • Better Life Stories Make Better Lives: A Reply to Berg.Antti Kauppinen - 2024 - Philosophical Studies 181 (6):1507-1521.
    Is it good for us if the different parts of our lives are connected to each other like the parts of a good story? Some philosophers have thought so, while others have firmly rejected it. In this paper, I focus on the state-of-the-art anti-narrativist arguments Amy Berg has recently presented in this journal. I argue that while she makes a good case that the best kind of lives for us do not revolve around a single project or theme, the best (...)
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  • Philosophy and Meaning in Life Vol.5: Selected Papers from the Tohoku Conference.Masahiro Morioka (ed.) - 2024 - Tokyo: Journal of Philosophy of Life.
    This book is a collection of all the papers published in the special issue "Philosophy and Meaning in Life Vol. 5: Selected Papers from the Tohoku Conference," Journal of Philosophy of Life Vol. 14 , No.1, 2024 , 1-53 . -/- Perfectionism and Vulgarianism About a Meaningful Life David Matheson -/- What’s the Point If We’re All Going to Die?: Pessimism, Moderation, and the Reality of the Past Matthew Pianalto -/- Meaning in Life in the Context of Psychopathology and Personal (...)
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  • Attraction, Aversion, and Meaning in Life.Alisabeth Ayars - forthcoming - Journal of Ethics and Social Philosophy.
    Desire comes in two kinds: attraction and aversion. But contemporary theories of desire have paid little attention to the distinction, and some philosophers doubt that it is psychologically real. I argue that one reason to think there is a difference between the attitudes, and to care about it, is that attractions and aversions contribute in radically different ways to our well-being. Attraction-motivated activity adds to the good life in a way that aversion-driven activity doesn’t. I argue further that the value (...)
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  • Suicide as Protest.Antti Kauppinen - forthcoming - In Michael Cholbi & Paolo Stellino (eds.), Oxford Handbook of the Philosophy of Suicide. Oxford University Press.
    While suicide is typically associated with personal despair, people do sometimes kill themselves in the hope or expectation that their death will advance a political cause by way of its impact on the conscience of others, or in extreme cases simply as an expression of protest against a status quo felt to be unjust. Paradigm cases of such protest suicide may be public acts of self-immolation. This chapter distinguishes between instrumental and expressive protest suicide, examines the possible motivations behind them, (...)
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  • Telic Perfectionism and the Badness of Pain.Antti Kauppinen - forthcoming - In Mauro Rossi & Christine Tappolet (eds.), Perspectives on Ill-Being. Oxford University Press.
    Why is unpleasant pain bad for us? Evidently because of how it feels. This bit of commonsense is a challenge for well-being perfectionism, since pain doesn’t look anything like failure to fulfill human nature. Here, I sketch a new version of perfectionism that avoids this problem. To explain what is basically good for us, it appeals to the capacities whose functioning defines who we are, or our subjective nature, instead of human nature. I argue that these capacities have a telic (...)
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  • 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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  • Do Good Lives Make Good Stories?Amy Berg - 2023 - Philosophical Studies 180 (2):637-659.
    Narrativists about well-being claim that our lives go better for us if they make good stories—if they exhibit cohesion, thematic consistency, and narrative arc. Yet narrativism leads to mistaken assessments of well-being: prioritizing narrative makes it harder to balance and change pursuits, pushes us toward one-dimensionality, and can’t make sense of the diversity of good lives. Some ways of softening key narrativist claims mean that the view can’t tell us very much about how to live a good life that we (...)
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  • Fulfilled present and rhythm of life.Roland Kipke - 2023 - Ethik in der Medizin 35 (1):23-42.
    Definition of the problem: The connection between time and the good life has already been worked out for a number of medical specialties and practices. However, what role does the temporality of the good life play for medicine as a whole? That is the central question of this article. Arguments: The good life is here understood as a meaningful life. Living meaningfully is only possible through present action. A fulfilled presence in this sense is therefore an essential aspect of the (...)
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  • Ultimate Meaning: We Don't Have It, We Can't Get It, and We Should Be Very, Very Sad.Rivka Weinberg - 2021 - Journal of Controversial Ideas 1 (1).
    Life is pointless. That’s not okay. I show that. I argue that a point is a valued end and that, as agents, it makes sense for us to want our efforts and enterprises to have a point. Valued ends provide justifying reasons for our acts, efforts, and projects. I further argue that ends lie separate from the acts and enterprises for which they provide a point. Since there can be no end external to one’s entire life since one’s life includes (...)
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  • What makes a life meaningful? Folk intuitions about the content and shape of meaningful lives.Joffrey Fuhrer & Florian Cova - 2023 - Philosophical Psychology 36 (3):477-509.
    It is often assumed that most people want their life to be “meaningful”. But what exactly does this mean? Though numerous research have documented which factors lead people to experience their life as meaningful and people’s theories about the best ways to secure a meaningful life, investigations in people’s concept of meaningful life are scarce. In this paper, we investigate the folk concept of a meaningful life by studying people’s third-person attribution of meaningfulness. We draw on hypotheses from the philosophical (...)
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  • Sinn und Zeit. Zu zwei Dimensionen des guten Lebens.Eva Weber-Guskar - 2022 - Zeitschrift für Philosophische Forschung 76 (1):5-26.
    Philosophical theories of the good life usually focus on at least one of three as- pects by which a human life can be assessed: well-being, meaning or morality. This paper seeks to contribute to a better understanding of the idea of meaning in life. It argues that the dimension of meaning in a human life is conditioned by time; an idea which has so far not been sufficiently considered. Firstly, Susan Wolf's approach is presented, in which meaning is understood to (...)
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  • 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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  • (2 other versions)Well‐being, part 2: Theories of well‐being.Eden Lin - 2022 - Philosophy Compass 17 (2):e12813.
    Theories of well-being purport to identify the features of lives, and of intervals within lives, in virtue of which some people are high in well-being and others are low in well-being. They also purport to identify the properties that make some events or states of affairs good for a person and other events or states of affairs bad for a person. This article surveys some of the main theories of well-being, with an emphasis on work published since the turn of (...)
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  • When Death Comes Too Late: Radical Life Extension and the Makropulos Case.Michael Hauskeller - 2021 - Royal Institute of Philosophy Supplement 90:147-166.
    Famously, Bernard Williams has argued that although death is an evil if it occurs when we still have something to live for, we have no good reason to desire that our lives be radically extended because any such life would at some point reach a stage when we become indifferent to the world and ourselves. This is supposed to be so bad for us that it would be better if we died before that happens. Most critics have rejected Williams’ arguments (...)
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  • Meaning and Anti-Meaning in Life and What Happens After We Die.Sven Nyholm - 2021 - Royal Institute of Philosophy Supplement 90:11-31.
    The absence of meaningfulness in life is meaninglessness. But what is the polar opposite of meaningfulness? In recent and ongoing work together with Stephen Campbell and Marcello di Paola respectively, I have explored what we dub ‘anti-meaning’: the negative counterpart of positive meaning in life. Here, I relate this idea of ‘anti-meaningful’ actions, activities, and projects to the topic of death, and in particular the deaths or suffering of those who will live after our own deaths. Connecting this idea of (...)
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  • Dying for a Cause: Meaning, Commitment, and Self-Sacrifice.Antti Kauppinen - 2021 - Royal Institute of Philosophy Supplement 90:57-80.
    Some people willingly risk or give up their lives for something they deeply believe in, for instance standing up to a dictator. A good example of this are members of the White Rose student resistance group, who rebelled against the Nazi regime and paid for it with their lives. I argue that when the cause is good, such risky activities (and even deaths themselves) can contribute to meaning in life in its different forms – meaning-as-mattering, meaning-as-purpose, and meaning-as-intelligibility. Such cases (...)
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  • Is Meaning in Life Constituted by Value or Intelligibility?Iddo Landau - 2021 - Philosophical Papers 50 (1-2):211-234.
    Several authors have recently argued that intelligibility, rather than value, constitutes life’s meaning. In this paper I criticize the intelligibility view by offering examples of cases in which i...
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  • Theory Without Theories: Well-Being, Ethics, and Medicine.Jennifer Hawkins - 2021 - Journal of Medicine and Philosophy 46 (6):656-683.
    Medical ethics would be better if people were taught to think more clearly about well-being or the concept of what is good for a person. Yet for a variety of reasons, bioethicists have generally paid little attention to this concept. Here, I argue, first, that focusing on general theories of welfare is not useful for practical medical ethics. I argue, second, for what I call the “theory-without-theories approach” to welfare in practical contexts. The first element of this approach is a (...)
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  • Explanatory perfectionism: A fresh take on an ancient theory.Michael Prinzing - 2020 - Analysis (4):704-712.
    The ‘Big 3’ theories of well-being—hedonism, desire-satisfactionism, and objective list theory—attempt to explain why certain things are good for people by appealing to prudentially good-making properties. But they don’t attempt to explain why the properties they advert to make something good for a person. Perfectionism, the view that well-being consists in nature-fulfilment, is often considered a competitor to these views (or else a version of the objective list theory). However, I argue that perfectionism is best understood as explaining why certain (...)
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