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  1. 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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  • Imagination, Suffering, and Perfection: A Kierkegaardian Reflection on Meaning in Life.Jeffrey Hanson - 2021 - History of Philosophy Quarterly 38 (4):337-356.
    Engaging the thought of the Danish thinker Søren Kierkegaard, I challenge a tendency within the analytic tradition of philosophy on the subject of meaning in life. Taking as a starting point Kierkegaard's insights about meaning in life, the striving needed to attain an imagined ideal self, and his paradoxical conception of the perfection available to human life, I claim that meaning in life is a function of an individual's striving for an ideal self. This continuous effort to achieve myself is (...)
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  • 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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  • Despair as a Threat to Meaning: Kierkegaard’s Challenge to Objectivist Theories.Jeffrey Hanson - 2021 - Philosophies 6 (4):92.
    The question of meaning in life has enjoyed renewed attention in analytic discourse over the last few decades. Despite the apparently “existential” quality of this topic, existential philosophy has had little impact on this re-energized conversation. This paper draws on Kierkegaard’s _The Sickness unto Death_ in order to challenge the objectivist theory of meaning in life. According to that theory, a meaningful life is one replete with objective goods. Kierkegaard, however, exposits four forms of the spiritual sickness he calls despair (...)
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  • From the meaning triad to meaning holism: Unifying life’s meaning.Joshua Seachris - 2019 - Human Affairs 29 (4):363-378.
    Claims that talk of life’s meaning is misguided, unmanageable or, worse, nonsensical, are overblown. Such claims especially track the cosmically focused the meaning of life. “The meaning of life” is perfectly intelligible, and is centered on a cluster of ideas encapsulated by what I call the “meaning triad.” One component of this triad—I-MEANING—provides the hermeneutical and conceptual resources for understanding the question “What is the meaning of life?” as asking for a single thing, in contrast to amalgam and pluralist views. (...)
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  • To Be or Never to Have Been: Anti-Natalism and a Life Worth Living.Aaron Smuts - 2013 - Ethical Theory and Moral Practice 17 (4):711-729.
    David Benatar argues that being brought into existence is always a net harm and never a benefit. I disagree. I argue that if you bring someone into existence who lives a life worth living (LWL), then you have not all things considered wronged her. Lives are worth living if they are high in various objective goods and low in objective bads. These lives constitute a net benefit. In contrast, lives worth avoiding (LWA) constitute a net harm. Lives worth avoiding are (...)
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  • The No Self View and the Meaning of Life.Baptiste Le Bihan - 2019 - Philosophy East and West 69 (2):419-438.
    Several philosophers, both in Buddhist and Western philosophy, claim that the self does not exist. The no-self view may, at first glance, appear to be a reason to believe that life is meaningless. In the present article, I argue indirectly in favor of the no-self view by showing that it does not entail that life is meaningless. I then examine Buddhism and argue, further, that the no-self view may even be construed as partially grounding an account of the meaning of (...)
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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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  • What good is meaning in life?Christopher Woodard - 2017 - De Ethica 4 (3):67-79.
    Most philosophers writing on meaning in life agree that it is a distinct kind of final value. This consensus view has two components: the ‘final value claim’ that meaning in life is a kind of final value, and the ‘distinctness claim’ that it is distinct from all other kinds of final value. This paper discusses some difficulties in vindicating both claims at once. One way to underscore the distinctness of meaning, for example, is to retain a feature of our pretheoretical (...)
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  • Neutrality, Partiality, and Meaning in Life.Thaddeus Metz - 2017 - De Ethica 4 (3):7-25.
    Discussion of whether values and norms are neutral or not has mainly appeared in works on the nature of prudential rationality and morality. Little systematic has yet appeared in the up and coming field of the meaning of life. What are the respects in which the value of meaningfulness is neutral or, in contrast, partial, relational, or ‘biased’? In this article, I focus strictly on answering this question. First, I aim to identify the salient, and perhaps exhaustive, respects in which (...)
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  • Education and Life's Meaning.Anders Schinkel, Doret J. de Ruyter & Aharon Aviram - 2016 - Journal of Philosophy of Education 50 (3):398-418.
    There are deep connections between education and the question of life's meaning, which derive, ultimately, from the fact that, for human beings, how to live—and therefore, how to raise one's children—is not a given but a question. One might see the meaning of life as constitutive of the meaning of education, and answers to the question of life's meaning might be seen as justifying education. Our focus, however, lies on the contributory relation: our primary purpose is to investigate whether and (...)
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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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  • Education and Life's Meaning.Anders Schinkel, Doret J. Ruyter & Aharon Aviram - 2016 - Journal of Philosophy of Education 50 (2):398-418.
    There are deep connections between education and the question of life's meaning, which derive, ultimately, from the fact that, for human beings, how to live—and therefore, how to raise one's children—is not a given but a question. One might see the meaning of life as constitutive of the meaning of education, and answers to the question of life's meaning might be seen as justifying education. Our focus, however, lies on the contributory relation: our primary purpose is to investigate whether and (...)
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  • Recent Work on the Meaning of Life and Philosophy of Religion.T. J. Mawson - 2013 - Philosophy Compass 8 (12):1138-1146.
    ‘The Meaning of Life’ and ‘The Philosophy of Religion’ have meant different things to different people, and so I do well to alert my reader to what these phrases mean to me and thus to the subject area of this review of recent work on their intersection. First, ‘The Meaning of Life’: within the analytic tradition, an idea has gained widespread assent; whatever the vague and enigmatic nature of the phrase ‘the meaning of life’, we may sensibly speak of meaningfulness (...)
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  • Optimistic Naturalism: Scientific Advancement and the Meaning of Life.Dan Weijers - 2014 - Sophia 53 (1):1-18.
    Naturalist theories of the meaning of life are sometimes criticised for not setting the bar high enough for what counts as a meaningful life. Tolstoy’s version of this criticism is that Naturalist theories do not describe really meaningful lives because they do not require that we connect our finite lives with the infinite. Another criticism of Naturalist theories is that they cannot adequately resolve the Absurd—the vast difference between how meaningful our actions and lives appear from subjective and objective viewpoints. (...)
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  • 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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  • The Good Cause Account of the Meaning of Life.Aaron Smuts - 2013 - Southern Journal of Philosophy 51 (4):536-562.
    I defend the theory that one's life is meaningful to the extent that one promotes the good. Call this the good cause account (GCA) of the meaning of life. It holds that the good effects that count towards the meaning of one's life need not be intentional. Nor must one be aware of the effects. Nor does it matter whether the same good would have resulted if one had not existed. What matters is that one is causally responsible for the (...)
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  • Ubuntu as a Moral Theory: Reply to Four Critics.Thaddeus Metz - 2007 - South African Journal of Philosophy 26 (4):369-87.
    In this article, I respond to questions about, and criticisms of, my article “Towardan African Moral Theory” that have been put forth by Allen Wood, Mogobe Ramose, Douglas Farland and Jason van Niekerk. The major topicsI address include: what bearing the objectivity of moral value should have on cross-cultural moral differences between Africans and Westerners; whether a harmonious relationship is a good candidate for having final moral value; whether consequentialism exhausts the proper way to respond to the value of a (...)
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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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  • Perception and Perplexity of the Meaning of Life.Karthik Philo - manuscript
    From the inception of philosophizing process of man, the question of life’s meaning has been a significant quest. For millennia, thinkers have addressed the question of what, if anything, makes a life meaningful in some form or other. The basic idea of the question of life’s meaning is depicted, to rethink the age-old question again, in this chapter by tracing the right sense of the quest under the first sub-title to avoid ambiguity and by presenting the significance of the question (...)
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  • Painful Art and the Limits of Well-Being.Aaron Smuts - 2013 - In Jerrold Levinson (ed.), Suffering Art Gladly: The Paradox of Negative Emotions in Art. Palgrave/Macmillan.
    In this chapter I explore what painful art can tell us about the nature and importance of human welfare. My goal is not so much to defend a new solution to the paradox of tragedy, as it is to explore the implications of the kinds of solutions that I find attractive. Both nonhedonic compensatory theories and constitutive theories explain why people seek out painful art, but they have troublesome implications. On some narrow theories of well-being, they imply that painful art (...)
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  • Five Tests for What Makes a Life Worth Living.Aaron Smuts - 2013 - Journal of Value Inquiry 47 (4):1-21.
    I evaluate four historically precedented tests for what makes a life worth living: (1) The Suicide Test (Camus), (2) The Recurrence Test (Schopenhauer and Nietzsche), (3) The Extra Life Test (Cicero and Hume), and (4) The Preferring Not to Have Been Test (Job and Williams). I argue that all four fail and tentatively defend the heuristic value of a fifth, The Pre-Existence Test for what makes a life worth living: (5) A life worth living is one that a benevolent caretaker (...)
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  • (9 other versions)طبیعت‌گرایی خوش‌بینانه و معناداری زندگی.سیدمصطفی میرباباپور & یوسف دانشور نیلو - 2016 - پژوهشنامه فلسفه دین 14 (1):143-164.
    نظریه‌های معنای زندگی را در یک تقسیم‌بندی کلان و اجمالی می‌توان به دو دستۀ دیدگاه‌های طبیعت‌گرا و غیرطبیعت‌گرا افراز کرد. یکی از اشکالات همیشگی وارد بر دیدگاه‌های طبیعت‌گرا ناتوانی آنها در حل معضل پوچی است؛ طبیعت‌گرایی خوش‌بینانه عنوان ایده‌ای است که مدعی شده بر مبنای پیشرفت‌های علمی و دستاوردهای فناورانه می‌توان، در عین پای‌بندی به طبیعت‌گرایی، از معضل پوچی رهایی یافت. در این مقاله، با تأکید بر دیدگاه‌های لئو تولستوی و تامس نیگل دربارۀ معضل پوچی، طبیعت‌گرایی خوش‌بینانه، بر مبنای دیدگاه (...)
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  • Wittgenstein on meaning and life.David Kishik - 2008 - Philosophia 36 (1):111-128.
    This is a paper about the way language meshes with life. It focuses on Ludwig Wittgenstein’s later work, and compares it with Leo Tolstoy and Saint Augustine’s confessions. My aim is to better understand in this way what it means to have meaning in language, as well as meaning in life.
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  • On the meaning of “the meaning of life”.Tufan Kiymaz - 2019 - Filosofia Unisinos 20 (2).
    When it comes to a question as notoriously unclear as “What is the meaning of life?” clarifying the question and its conceptual setting is a necessary step before attempting to answer the question. The analysis of the concept of “the meaning of life” is a twofold task; “the meaning” and “life” both need to be examined. In this paper, I primarily focus on “the meaning”. I argue that, although there is much disagreement and confusion in the literature about the meaning (...)
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  • Science, religion, and the meaning of life and the universe: “Amalgam” narratives of polish natural scientists.Maria Rogińska - 2016 - Zygon 51 (4):904-924.
    This article deals with phenomena occurring at the interface of the existential, the religious, and scientific inquiry. On the basis of in-depth interviews with Polish physicists and biologists, I examine the role that science and religion play in their narrative of the meaning of the Universe and human life. I show that the narratives about meaning have a system-related character that is associated with responses to adjacent metaphysical questions, including those based on scientific knowledge. I reconstruct the typical amalgam questions (...)
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  • La ricerca di un senso nella vita, la prospettiva morale e i limiti di una concezione sentimentalista.Stefano Bacin - 2017 - Etica E Politica 19 (2):287-304.
    I discuss Eugenio Lecaldano’s view of the search for meaning in life as presented in "Sul senso della vita" (Bologna, il Mulino, 2016), focusing on three issues. First, I suggest that an accurate account should accommodate both a prospective and a retrospective mode of the reflection on meaning in one’s own life. Second, I argue that Lecaldano’s distinction between meaningfulness and morality is underdetermined in two respects: (a) because a more flexible view of morality is able to integrate a consideration (...)
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  • Eine Bedrohung für den Sinn? Human Enhancement und das sinnvolle Leben.Markus Rüther - 2021 - Ethik in der Medizin 33 (4):467-483.
    Das allgemeine Thema des Artikels besteht darin, zwei Diskussionskreise miteinander zu verbinden, die in Isolation betrachtet gut erforscht sind, aber selten zusammengebracht werden: die Diskussion um das sogenannte Human Enhancement und die Debatte um das sinnvolle Leben. Hierbei wird insbesondere die Behauptung ins Blickfeld gerückt, dass Techniken des Human Enhancement einen negativen Einfluss auf den Sinn haben könnten. Ist diese These plausibel? In diesem Artikel wird die These verteidigt, dass diese Frage verneint werden muss. Methodisch werden hierfür drei Varianten untersucht, (...)
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