I argue that a self-referential sense of humor is positively self-accepting by acknowledging imperfection, abnormality, or average status, without genuinely intending ridicule on oneself. Instead, standards of perfection, normality, and greatness are the implicit targets of ridicule, which can provide a form of bonding among those having this sense of humor, who can then find commonality amongst themselves and relief from the pressure of those exacting standards. This self-accepting sense of humor helps to make life more meaningful by facilitating contentment (...) with imperfection both with respect to oneself and one’s situation. While a sense of humor can certainly be helpful for improving character, a perfectionist argument such as this should be balanced by acknowledgement of the value that can be gained from simply accepting ourselves just as we are. (shrink)

The concept of alienation has been used to capture a specific kind of social ill or malady, and one that philosophers have argued is distinctive of life in modern society. I argue that there is a properly epistemic form of alienation present in modern society that arises due to a conflict between the dynamics of group knowledge and traditional requirements on the intellectual virtue of individuals. As group-based knowledge becomes increasingly widespread in modern society, the conflict with virtue becomes more (...) pervasive, and the virtuous become alienated from fundamental epistemic goods. The aim of this paper is to examine this conflict and to highlight that the ‘social turn’ in epistemology is not free from costs. (shrink)

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 (...) Recovery Bernice Brijan. (shrink)

Utilitarianism is the view that as far as morality goes, one ought to choose the option which will result in the most overall well-being—that is, that maximises the sum of whatever makes life worth living, with each person’s life equally weighted. The promise of utilitarianism is to reduce morality to one simple principle, easily incorporated into policy analysis, economics and decision theory. However, utilitarianism is not popular amongst moral philosophers today. This is in large part due to the influence of (...) Williams’s ‘Integrity Objection’ (1973). Though the Integrity Objection has been influential in turning philosophers against utilitarianism, it is also difficult to make precise, evidenced by the myriad interpretations in the literature. In this paper I interpret the objection as holding that agents who accept utilitarianism cannot, as a matter of psychology, be committed to their projects. I explore other interpretations, finding some to be inconsistent with Williams’s approach, and others to be relatively easily answerable by the utilitarian. The psychological problem I identify is harder for utilitarians to avoid, though I have begun to offer a response in other work. (shrink)

I argue that it’s quite comprehensible to get upset about metaethical nihilism, to indulge what I call nihilistic despair. When we lose the objective moral or normative point of view, we lose the promise of luck-immune guidance and categorical importance, things many of us hope for. This is all quite Williams-friendly, but I reject his puzzling but suggestive remarks that nihilistic despair must be a self-pitying muddle. Finally, I argue that internalism about reasons is even more depressing than outright nihilism, (...) in one way at least. (shrink)

The standard argument for longtermism assumes that we should care as much about far future people as about our contemporaries. I challenge this assumption. I first consider existing interpretations of ‘temporal discounting’, and argue that such discounting seems either unwarranted or insufficient to block the argument. I then offer two alternative reasons to care less about far future people: caring as much about them as about our contemporaries would make our lives less authentic and less meaningful. If I’m right, this (...) undermines at least the strongest versions of longtermism. Plausibly, we should do much more for the far future than we’re currently doing. Still, we often ought to act for contemporaries’ sakes, even if longtermist actions would expectably do more good. (shrink)

This is an edited transcript of a lecture given at the LSE in March 2023. The lecture introduces the “meaning of life” question via Tolstoy’s Confession, then considers the strengths and limitations of religious and secular answers to the question.

In a 2022 critique of the Bigelow Institute for Consciousness Studies essay competition on the “best” evidence for life after death (“the survival of human consciousness”) and in replies to two commentaries on it, I made passing reference to the parallels between the arguments provided by survival researchers—psychical researchers ostensibly investigating evidence for an afterlife using scientific best practices—and the well-worn fallacies repeatedly committed by creationists and other Christian apologists. In this essay, I highlight several parallel fallacious arguments found among (...) both those at the forefront of “scientific” research into an afterlife and those engaged in Christian apologetics. (shrink)

Brief overview of accounts of the meaning of life for 1000-Word Philosophy.

In this paper I’ll suggest that a certain challenge facing defeatist views about higher-order evidence cannot be met, namely, motivating principles that recommend abandoning belief in cases of higher order defeat, but do not recommend global scepticism. I’ll propose that, ultimately, the question of whether to abandon belief in response to the realization that our belief can’t be recovered from what I’ll call ‘a perspective of doubt’ can’t be answered through rational deliberation aimed at truth or accuracy.

Commanders gain authority from obedience and lose authority from disobedience. We should expect commanders to therefore devise commands that reduce the probability of disobedience. To aid recognition of these techniques for reducing the risk of disobedience, I focus on the extreme of case of commands that reduce the probability to zero. Each of my ten commandments illustrates a logical technique for engineering out disobedience. Once you master these safety measures, you can confidently legislate your own universal maxims. Your innovations will (...) be good news for Immanuel Kant’s characterization of morality in terms of categorical imperatives. The commandments also raise interesting questions about responsibility for necessities and the nature of rule following. (shrink)

The epistemological debate about radical skepticism has focused on whether our beliefs in apparently obvious claims, such as the claim that we have hands, amount to knowledge. Arguably, however, our concept of knowledge is only one of many knowledge-like concepts that there are. If this is correct, it follows that even if our beliefs satisfy our concept of knowledge, there are many other relevantly similar concepts that they fail to satisfy. And this might give us pause. After all, we might (...) wonder: What is so great about the concept of knowledge that we happen to have? Might it be more important, epistemically speaking, to investigate whether our beliefs satisfy some other relevantly similar concept instead? And how should questions such as these even be understood? This paper discusses the epistemological significance of these issues. In particular, a novel skeptical stance called ‘meta-skepticism’ is introduced, which is a kind of skepticism about the idea that some knowledge-like concepts are epistemically more important than others. It suggested that it is unclear whether this form of skepticism can be avoided. (shrink)

Despite sustained philosophical attention, no theory of humor claims general acceptance. Drawing on the resources provided by intentional systems theory, this article first outlines an approach to investigating humor based on the idea of a comic stance, then sketches the Dismissal Theory of Humor that has resulted from pursuing that approach. According to the DTH, humor manifests in cases where the future-directed significance of anticipatory failures is dismissed. Mirth, on this view, is the reward people get for declining to update (...) predictive representational schemata in ways that maximize their future-oriented value. The theory aims to provide a plausible account of the role of humor in human mental and social life, but it also aims to be empirically vulnerable, and to generate testable predictions about how the comic stance may actually be undergirded by cognitive architectures. (shrink)

Despite sustained philosophical attention, no theory of humor claims general acceptance. Drawing on the resources provided by intentional systems theory, this article first outlines an approach to investigating humor based on the idea of a comic stance, then sketches the Dismissal Theory of Humor that has resulted from pursuing that approach. According to the DTH, humor manifests in cases where the future-directed significance of anticipatory failures is dismissed. Mirth, on this view, is the reward people get for declining to update (...) predictive representational schemata in ways that maximize their future-oriented value. The theory aims to provide a plausible account of the role of humor in human mental and social life, but it also aims to be empirically vulnerable, and to generate testable predictions about how the comic stance may actually be undergirded by cognitive architectures. (shrink)

Matti Eklund (2017) has argued that ardent realists face a serious dilemma. Ardent realists believe that there is a mind-independent fact as to which normative concepts we are to use. Eklund claims that the ardent realist cannot explain why this is so without plumping in favor of their own normative concepts or changing the topic. The paper first advances the discussion by clarifying two ways of understanding the question of which normative concepts to choose: a theoretical question about which concepts (...) have the abstract property of being normatively privileged and a further practical question of which concepts we are to choose even granting some concepts are thus privileged. I argue that the ardent realist’s best bet for answering the theoretical question while avoiding Eklund’s dilemma is to provide a real definition of this property. I point out the difficulties for providing such a definition. I then argue that even with an answer to the theoretical question, the ardent realist faces a further dilemma in answering the practical question. In sum, though I see no knock-down argument against ardent realism, it may nonetheless die a death by a thousand cuts. I close by considering a deeper reason for why ardent realism is so difficult to defend: every argument starts somewhere. It is unclear how there can be an Archimedean point that makes no reference to any normative concepts that can nonetheless be employed to convince everyone to adopt ours. I then briefly propose two options for someone still inclined towards realism: (i) accept that our normative concepts are normatively privileged without attempting to explain why this is so, or (ii) be less ardent and accept a perspective-dependent account of normativity. (shrink)

In his famous ‘Integrity Objection’, Bernard Williams condemns utilitarianism for requiring us to regard our projects as dispensable, and thus precluding us from being properly committed to them. In this paper, I argue against commitment as Williams defines it, drawing upon insights from the socialist tradition as well as mainstream analytic moral philosophy. I show that given the mutual interdependence of individuals (a phenomenon emphasised by socialists) several appealing non-utilitarian moral principles also require us to regard our projects as dispensable. (...) This means that those who endorse those principles cannot appeal to Williams’s argument against utilitarianism. It also puts pressure on his thought that moral theories ought to permit commitment – in fact, it suggests that they ought not. Regarding one’s projects as dispensable may be alienating, and this may motivate us to hang onto commitment and reject these non-utilitarian principles along with utilitarianism. However, commitment also threatens a kind of alienation – from other people. Drawing upon the socialist tradition again, I argue that avoiding this form of alienation is necessary for proper engagement with our projects, and thereby with ourselves. (shrink)

We often talk and behave as if being a man required more than just being male, and being a woman required more than just being female. There are expectations that need to be met if someone wants to fully qualify as a man or a woman in their social environment, expectations regarding their behaviour as well as character. It is, however, not entirely obvious what ‘being a man’ or ‘being a woman’ actually means and in what way and to what (...) extent it defines our identity, making us who we are. Would I be a different person if I were a woman? And what would it take for me to be a woman? Could I conceivably be neither? Or both? If gender were nothing but sex, telling a man to ‘be a man’ would make little sense. We may have different ideas about what it means to be a man or woman and how we need to behave in order to secure or maintain our manhood or womanhood, but we are all likely to have some deeply ingrained understanding of what makes a man a man and a woman a woman that goes beyond mere biology. Does it, however, follow that gender can, if necessary or desired, be completely detached from sex, that I can be a woman despite having all the physical attributes of a male member of my species, or a man despite being biologically female? If so, on what grounds exactly would we decide who is what? (shrink)

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 (...) all of one’s ends, leading and living one’s life as a whole cannot have a point. Finally, I argue that since we live our lives and structure our living­a­human­life efforts both in parts and as a whole, it is fitting to be sad to recognize that leading and living a life is pointless. My discussion helps make sense of the literature that frequently talks around this topic but often does so vaguely and indirectly. (shrink)

Guy Kahane holds that theism has unattractive consequences, since it threatens both privacy and autonomy. Here, I suggest that Kahane’s position echoes that of Dostoevsky’s famous Underground Man. But the Underground Man is ensnared in difficulties that resemble the problem of absurdity as developed by Thomas Nagel. Dostoevsky’s own solution to that problem involves love—but love naturally invites compromises with respect to privacy and autonomy. Perhaps the best way to solve the problem of absurdity is to make precisely the opposite (...) of Kahane’s axiological judgment— which would recommend pro-theism over anti-theism. (shrink)

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 account of (...) his response makes a valuable contribution to contemporary thought about the meaning and absurdity of life. I begin by drawing on classic discussions in the philosophical literature, and on Tolstoy's memoir, in order to characterize the problem of meaning and the problem of the absurd, and to clarify the relation between these problems. I then draw on Tolstoy's account of his response to his crisis in order to characterize a form of faith in our deepest values. I argue that such faith supplies one important part of the story concerning how we might respond to the problem of the absurd — a part that has been overlooked by more recent discussions of these issues. (shrink)

The purpose of this essay will be to set out an analysis of a certain philosophical, metaethical angst, which I call “absurd angst,” defend angsty thinking (to the extent it can be), and offer up hopeful suggestions regarding consolation of this angst. In short, I take absurd angst to be a painful worry that there are no normative, non-instrumental reasons to act. This worry, it seems to me, can only come about under a certain moral conceptual scheme, and I will (...) devote a large amount of time here to understanding it. This moral conceptual scheme leads the angsty to accept several nontrivial beliefs about the relationships between moral concepts and their application in true/accurate moral ascriptions. The angsty are led to these beliefs by, I think, a strongly ingrained set of moral concepts which form the basis of their moral system(s). Ultimately, I argue that absurd angst arises in some because the angsty possess moral concepts which lead them to believe either that normative reasons require external reasons (reasons which do not depend, in some critical way, on the internal evaluative states of agents), or that normative reasons require external sources of normativity (grounds or explanations for the normative force and authority of reasons which do not depend, in some critical way, on the internal evaluative states of agents) (these possibilities are not exclusive). This worries the angsty. First, because external sources of normativity are theoretically problematic, and this is felt to, in some way, make moral claims problematic. Second, because a host of painful consequences are thought to follow from a lack of these external sources and a denial of normative reasons to act. (shrink)

Some people are deeply dissatisfied by the universe that modern science reveals to us. They long for the world described by traditional religion. They do not believe in God, but they wish He had existed. I argue that this is a mistake. The naturalist world we inhabit is admittedly rather bleak. It is very far from being the best of all possible worlds. But an alternative governed by God is also unwelcome, and the things that might make God’s existence attractive—cosmic (...) justice or the afterlife—could also be had without God. The most desirable of all possible worlds are therefore godless. (shrink)

This paper argues that McDowell wrongly assumes that “terror”, Cavell’s reaction to the radical contingency of our shared modes of knowing or our “attunement”, expresses a skepticism that is antinomically bound to an equally unacceptable dogmatism because Cavell rather regards terror as a mood that reveals the “truth of skepticism”, namely, that there is no conclusive evidence for necessary attunement on pain of a category error, and that a precedent for McDowell’s misunderstanding is Hegel’s argument for necessary attunement in a (...) system of knowing, whose refutation Schelling holds it is the “merit of skepticism” to provide. (shrink)

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...

David Benatar and Thomas Nagel are both claiming that life is meaningless if judged from a cosmic perspective and both are claiming that our life is absurd. However, they understand ‘the absurdity of life’ in different ways. Benatar’s understanding of absurdity refers to the impossibility to transcend our limits from the cosmic perspective. This is strictly tied to a negative evaluation of our life. According to Benatar we have therefore a reason to regret our existence. Again, Nagel’s absurdity arises from (...) a clash of attitudes we have when we evaluate our life from the subjective and the objective perspective. Absurdity results from the incompatibility of our attitudes regarding our own life. We should therefore approach our lives with irony.I argue that neither regret nor irony are rationally recommended attitudes we should have to our life. I show that Benatar’s transcending-ones-limits approach to life’s meaning does not necessarily go hand in hand with a negative evaluation of our life. Although a transcending-ones-limits-approach of life’s meaning implies that our life is admittedly meaningless from a cosmic perspective it does not imply that it is to be judged as good or bad. However, the irony that Nagel advises is not recommended either, as subjective and objective attitude do not necessarily collide. As I read Nagel’s position the attitudes must collide because of a difference in evaluative certainty. I think this is not true because the evaluation of life is beset by doubts subjectively as well as objectively. (shrink)

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 (...) this, four objections are discussed and rebutted. The chapter concludes that we can be cautiously optimistic about the possibility of meaning in virtual worlds. (shrink)

A 10,000+ word critical overview of analytic philosophy devoted to life's meaning, with some focus on books and more recent works.

A zombie world is a possible world in which all the microphysical truths are identical to the truths in our world, but no one is phenomenally conscious. A zombie is an individual in a possible world whose microphysical truths are identical to the microphysical truths of an individual in our world, but who has none of the phenomenal conscious experiences of the individual in our world. An inverted is an individual in a possible world whose microphysical truths are not only (...) identical to the microphysical truths of an individual in our world, but who also has phenomenal conscious experiences. These experiences, however, are qualitatively different from the ones of the individual in our world. The first premise of Chalmers’ conceivability argument against materialism is that a zombie world, a zombie and an inverted are ideally conceivable. This paper rejects this premise in claiming that: given that current physics does not allow philosophers to establish a clear concept of the physical that could be opposed to something else non-physical, a zombie world, a zombie and an inverted are merely prima facie, but not ideally conceivable. This objection is called the Obscurity of the Physical Objection.Key-words: Zombies, qualia, conceivability, possibility, physics. (shrink)

To what extent can humorism be a legitimate disposition toward the Absurd? The Absurd is born from the insurmountable contradiction between one’s ceaseless striving and the absence of an ultimate resolution – or, as I prefer to call it, the ‘dissolution of resolution’. Humoristic Absurdism is the commitment to a pattern of humorous responses to the Absurd, which regard this absurd condition, as well as its manifestation in absurd situations, as a comical phenomenon. Although the humoristic disposition seems promising, by (...) virtue of humor’s recognition of incongruity and its denial of an ultimate resolution, and succeeds in countering three major objections, it falls prey to the claim that comprehensive humorism portrays as frivolous what is earnest, thereby renouncing the gravity of the desire for ultimate resolution, which is fundamental to the notion of the Absurd. In an attempt to explore alternative roles for humor in a legitimate disposition toward the Absurd, Metamodern Absurdism is suggested, which revolves around a post-ironic oscillation between humor and earnestness. In short, only in a role limited to one pole of an oscillatory pattern of responses can humor be integrated in a legitimate disposition toward the Absurd. (shrink)

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, (...) finding one’s life meaningful is warranted both by sustainable success in valuable prospective (future-oriented) projects, and by success in reflexive projects that aim to promote or realize a practice-dependent value that can be realized at each moment, but never for good. The latter kind of activities are only weakly atelic, since their aim remains distinct from the activity, and individual actions gain significance from serving a long-term commitment. Thus, whether our ground projects are prospective or reflexive, what we do at each moment contributes to leading a meaningful life only when it’s connected in the right way to what we do at other moments. (shrink)

Animal welfare has a long history of disregard. While in recent decades the study of animal welfare has become a scientific discipline of its own, the difficulty of measuring animal welfare can still be vastly underestimated. There are three primary theories, or perspectives, on animal welfare - biological functioning, natural living and affective state. These come with their own diverse methods of measurement, each providing a limited perspective on an aspect of welfare. This paper describes a perspectival pluralist account of (...) animal welfare, in which all three theoretical perspectives and their multiple measures are necessary to understand this complex phenomenon and provide a full picture of animal welfare. This in turn will offer us a better understanding of perspectivism and pluralism itself. (shrink)

The universe is enormous, perhaps unimaginably so. In comparison, we are very small. Does this suggest that humanity has little if any cosmic significance? And if we don’t matter, should that matter to us? Blaise Pascal, Frank Ramsey, Bertrand Russell, Susan Wolf, Harry Frankfurt, Stephen Hawking, and others have offered insightful answers to those questions. For example, Pascal and Ramsey emphasize that whereas the stars cannot think, human beings can. Through an exploration of some features of awe and its positive (...) effects on us, I offer a novel way of answering the second question: even if we don’t matter, we, unlike the stars, naturally benefit from observing our own smallness. I explore implications for accounts of the absurdity of human life. Life might be absurd. But I give reasons to think that life isn’t absurd in the ways some such as Nagel and Camus suggest. Finally, I connect non-symmetric awe with Buddhist insights to strengthen a recent and more positive account of how to find meaning in life. (shrink)

The ancient Chinese text theZhuangziraises a mix of epistemological, psychological, and conceptual challenges against the value and usefulness of philosophical disputation. But instead of advocating the elimination of philosophy, it implicitly embraces a broader conception of philosophy, the goal of which is to engage us to reflect on our limitations, question things we take for granted, and better appreciate alternative perspectives and possibilities. Philosophy thus understood is compatible with a variety of methods and approaches: fictions, jokes, paradoxes, spiritual exercises, argument, (...) disputation, and so on. Philosophical practices, on this view, also pave the way for an open‐minded, adaptive and flexible way of living that is at the core of the Zhuangist good life. (shrink)

Formula One isn’t very important. You can't care about it too much. The refugee crisis is more important. You can care about it much more. In this paper we investigate how important something is. By ‘importance’ we mean how much it is fitting to care about a thing. We explore a view about this which we call Proportionalism. This view says that a thing’s importance depends on that thing’s share of the world’s total value. The more of what matters there (...) is, the less you can care about each thing in particular. The less of what matters there is, the more you can care about each thing in particular. We argue that, in many respects, Proportionalism is superior to its competitors. It captures some intuitions they leave out and it has a powerful motivation. So, we suggest, you should keep things in proportion. (shrink)

Absurdist accounts of life’s meaning posit that life is absurd because our pretensions regarding its meaning conflict with the actual or perceived reality of the situation. Relationary accounts posit that contingent things gain their meaning only from their relationship to other meaningful things. I take a detailed look at the two types of account, and, proceeding under the assumption that they are correct, combine them to see what the implications of such a combination might be. I conclude that another way (...) of looking at the absurdity of life is to see it as a conflict between our dual beliefs that there exist intrinsically meaningful contingent things, and that contingent things may only gain their meaning extrinsically through their relationships to other meaningful things. In this way, I provide another lens through which feelings of life’s absurdity may be interpreted and analysed: as the conflict between the simultaneous beliefs in both intrinsically and relationally meaningful contingent things. Looking through this lens gives us an entirely different framework for analysing life’s absurdity than that which Nagel described in 1971, providing opportunity for more potential avenues of analysis and discussion. (shrink)

We find meaning and value in our lives by engaging in everyday projects. But, according to a recent argument by Samuel Scheffler, this value doesn’t depend merely on what the projects are about. In many cases, it depends also on the future generations that will replace us. By imagining the imminent extinction of humanity soon after our own deaths, we can recognize both that much of our current valuing depends on a background confidence in the ongoing survival of humanity and (...) that the survival and flourishing of those future generations matters to us. After presenting Scheffler’s argument, I will explore two twentieth century precursors—Hans Morgenthau and Simone de Beauvoir—before returning to Scheffler to see that his argument can not only show us why future generations matter, but it can also give us hope for immortality and a blueprint for embracing a changing future. (shrink)

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 (...) net high in objective bads and low in objective goods. It is the prospect of a LWA that gives us good reason to not bring someone into existence. Happily, many lives are not worth avoiding. Contra Benatar, many are indeed worth living. Even if we grant Benatar his controversial asymmetry thesis, we have no reason to think that coming into existence is always a net harm. (shrink)

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 (...) life. (shrink)

This essay examines whether or not absurdity is intrinsic to human life. It takes Camus’ interpretation of ‘The Absurd’ as its conceptual starting point. It traces such thought back to Schopenhauer, whose work is then critically analysed. This analysis focuses primarily on happiness and meaning. This essay accepts some of Schopenhauer’s premises, but rejects his conclusions. Instead, it considers Nietzsche’s alternatives and the role of suffering in life. It posits that suffering may help people acquire meaning and escape absurdity. It (...) then analyses the role of compassion in absurdity, in reference to Nietzsche’s work and Buddhist teachings. Lastly, it examines absurdity in relation to death, rejecting the notion that death exacerbates absurdity. This paper understands absurdity to be a natural part of the human condition, as characterised by suffering, death and an absence of meaning. It concludes that although human life is absurd by nature, it need not remain so. (shrink)

As an evaluative view in the philosophy of life, nihilism maintains that no lives are, all things considered, worth living. Prominent defenders of the view hold that, even so, it can be all-things-considered better for us to continue living than for us to cease living, thus endorsing a 'soft' nihilism that appears more palatable than its 'hard' counterpart. In support of an intuitive assumption about what nihilism implies, I argue that soft nihilism is incoherent.

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 (...) life requires objective value and raise doubts about their strength. Finally, I argue that beauty is not plausibly objective, but that it seems important for meaning. This puts pressure on the objectivist to explain why objectivity matters in the case of other values. (shrink)

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 (...) issues of neutrality arise in the contexts of life’s meaning. In addition to providing a taxonomy of the key points of contention, a second aim is to advance reflection about them by considering the most important arguments that have been marshalled in favour of one side or the other, particularly as they appear in recent neutral positions. I conclude that meaning in life is neutral with respect to time but not any other conditions such as agents and patients, with a third aim being to point out that this makes the value of meaning different from the kinds of non/neutrality encountered in some salient conceptions of prudence and morality. (shrink)

This article argues that the creation of artificial offspring could make our lives more meaningful. By ‘artificial offspring’ I mean beings that we construct, with a mix of human and non-human-like qualities. Robotic artificial intelligences are paradigmatic examples of the form. There are two reasons for thinking that the creation of such beings could make our lives more meaningful and valuable. The first is that the existence of a collective afterlife—i.e. a set of human-like lives that continue after we die—is (...) likely to be an important source and sustainer of meaning in our present lives. The second is that the creation of artificial offspring provides a plausible and potentially better pathway to a collective afterlife than the traditional biological pathway. Both of these arguments are defended from a variety of objections and misunderstandings. (shrink)

Part of the Elements Philosophy of Religion series, this short book focuses on the spiritual dimensions of life’s meaning as they have been discussed in the recent English and mainly analytic philosophical literature. The overarching philosophical question that this literature has addressed is about the extent to which, and respects in which, spiritual realities such as God or a soul would confer meaning on our lives. There have been four broad answers to the question, namely: God or a soul is (...) necessary for meaning in our lives; they are not necessary for it; one or both would enhance the meaning in our lives; and they would detract from it. These views have been largely advanced in chronological order through the history of Western philosophy, with the view that life would be meaningless without God and a soul having been most prominent in the medieval period, the rejection of this claim having arisen in the modern era, and then sophisticated positions about enhancement or reduction having appeared in earnest only in the past 20 years. This book addresses all four positions, paying particular attention to the more recent views. Beyond familiarizing readers with these positions, it presents prima facie objections to them, points out gaps in research agendas, and suggests argumentative strategies that merit development. (shrink)

In this paper I discuss Øyvind Dahl’s argument for the conclusion that Malagasy people conceive of the future as coming from behind them and not as being before them as most worldviews do. I argue that we have good reason not to attribute this view to Malagasy people. First, it would mark an inefficient and anomalous way of keeping track of the past and future. Second, the linguistic and testimonial evidence presented by Dahl doesn’t support the conclusion. Even though this (...) specific argument fails, Dahl has many enlightening things to say about Malagasy time conceptions, such as the various time-conceptions that figure more predominantly in their worldview as opposed to the general modern Western worldview. Dahl is right that successful communication for Westerners in Madagascar requires understanding that the Malagasy worldview is structured more by an event-related conception of time than the general modern Western worldview. I also show in this paper that the three time conceptions Dahl outlines are relevant to living a good life. (shrink)

Meaning in life is too important not to study systematically, but doing so is made difficult by conceptual indeterminacy. An approach to meaning that is promising but, indeed, conceptually vague is Jonathan Haidt’s ‘cross-level coherence’ account. In order to remove the vagueness, I propose a concept of ‘good fit’ that a) captures central aspects of meaning as it is discussed in the literature; b) brings the subject of meaning under the survey of the dynamicist or ‘embodied-embedded’ philosophy of cognition; and (...) c) allows the theoretical discussion on meaning to become more focused and systematic. The article addresses two apparent problems with the idea of ‘good fit,’ namely the fact that both challenges and relations of an agent with the outside world are central to meaning. It is finally pointed out which implications adopting the concept of ‘good fit’ instead of ‘meaning’ would have. (shrink)