Download or read book Philosophy in a Meaningless Life written by James Tartaglia and published by Bloomsbury Publishing. This book was released on 2015-12-17 with total page 233 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book is open access and available on www.bloomsburycollections.com. It is funded by Knowledge Unlatched. Philosophy in a Meaningless Life provides an account of the nature of philosophy which is rooted in the question of the meaning of life. It makes a powerful and vivid case for believing that this question is neither obscure nor obsolete, but reflects a quintessentially human concern to which other traditional philosophical problems can be readily related; allowing them to be reconnected with natural interest, and providing a diagnosis of the typical lines of opposition across philosophy's debates. James Tartaglia looks at the various ways philosophers have tried to avoid the conclusion that life is meaningless, and in the process have distanced philosophy from the concept of transcendence. Rejecting all of this, Tartaglia embraces nihilism ('we are here with nothing to do'), and uses transcendence both to provide a new solution to the problem of consciousness, and to explain away perplexities about time and universals. He concludes that with more self-awareness, philosophy can attain higher status within a culture increasingly in need of it.
Download or read book The Concept of Meaninglessness written by Edward Erwin and published by JHU Press. This book was released on 2019-12-01 with total page 170 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Originally published in 1970. Many contemporary philosophers have thought that certain philosophic disputes could be settled by using the concept of meaninglessness. To solve philosophic problems in this way, however, it seemed necessary to provide a reliable criterion for deciding when a particular sentence or statement is meaningless. But devising such a criterion has proved to be very difficult. In fact, in recent years many philosophers have become quite skeptical about the adequacy of the standard criteria of meaninglessness. Some of the more radical skeptics have even argued that the concept of meaninglessness, as it is used by philosophers, is itself defective and would be even if an adequate criterion could be found. Professor Erwin, in a systematic study of the concept of meaninglessness, begins by examining the standard criteria of meaninglessness proposed by philosophers. These criteria include operationalist, verificationist, and type or category criteria. Each of these criteria, he argues, is inadequate. Erwin then turns to the question, What kinds of items, if any, should be said to be meaningless? Most philosophers concerned with this question have claimed that only sentences, not statements or propositions, can be meaningless. Erwin argues, however, that this is wrong: statements (and propositions) can be meaningless. Once this is demonstrated, it can then be shown that the more radical skepticism about the philosophic use of the concept of meaninglessness is misguided. In particular, Erwin shows that the following assertions of the radical skeptic are false: that what is meaningless is relative to a given language or to a given time, and that the concept of meaninglessness forces us to condemn as nonsense metaphors comprehensible to competent speakers of English. In his concluding chapter, Erwin considers the implications of there not being any adequate general criterion of meaninglessness. He then tries to show how the concept of meaninglessness, when interpreted in the manner he suggests, can be profitably used by philosophers, despite the many persuasive objections to its use that philosophers have raised in their disputes over it.
Download or read book Finding Meaning in an Imperfect World written by Iddo Landau and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2017-07-01 with total page 288 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Does life have meaning? Is it possible for life to be meaningful when the world is filled with suffering and when so much depends merely upon chance? Even if there is meaning, is there enough to justify living? These questions are difficult to resolve. There are times in which we face the mundane, the illogically cruel, and the tragic, which leave us to question the value of our lives. However, Iddo Landau argues, our lives often are, or could be made, meaningfulwe've just been setting the bar too high for evaluating what meaning there is. When it comes to meaning in life, Landau explains, we have let perfect become the enemy of the good. We have failed to find life perfectly meaningful, and therefore have failed to see any meaning in our lives. We must attune ourselves to enhancing and appreciating the meaning in our lives, and Landau shows us how to do that. In this warmly written book, rich with examples from the author's life, film, literature, and history, Landau offers new theories and practical advice that awaken us to the meaning already present in our lives and demonstrates how we can enhance it. He confronts prevailing nihilist ideas that undermine our existence, and the questions that dog us no matter what we believe. While exposing the weaknesses of ideas that lead many to despair, he builds a strong case for maintaining more hope. Along the way, he faces provocative questions: Would we choose to live forever if we could? Does death render life meaningless? If we examine it in the context of the immensity of the whole universe, can we consider life meaningful? If we feel empty once we achieve our goals, and the pursuit of these goals is what gives us a sense of meaning, then what can we do? Finding Meaning in an Imperfect World is likely to alter the way you understand your life.
Download or read book Nihilism and Philosophy written by Gideon Baker and published by Bloomsbury Publishing. This book was released on 2018-04-19 with total page 240 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The question of nihilism is always a question of truth. It is a crisis of truth that causes the experience of the nothingness of existence. What elevated truth to this existential position? The answer is: philosophy. The philosophical will to truth opens the door to nihilism, since it both makes identifying truth the utmost aim and yet continually calls it into question. Baker develops the central insight that the crises of truth and of existence, or 'loss of world', that occur within nihilistic thought are inseparable, in a wide-ranging study from antiquity to the present, from ancient Cynics, St Paul, Nietzsche, Heidegger, Foucault, Agamben, and Badiou. Baker contends that since nihilism is always a question of the relation to the world occasioned by the philosophical will to truth, an answer to nihilism must be able to propose a new understanding of truth.
Download or read book Laughing at Nothing written by John Marmysz and published by State University of New York Press. This book was released on 2012-02-01 with total page 218 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Disputing the common misconception that nihilism is wholly negative and necessarily damaging to the human spirit, John Marmysz offers a clear and complete definition to argue that it is compatible, and indeed preferably responded to, with an attitude of good humor. He carefully scrutinizes the phenomenon of nihilism as it appears in the works, lives, and actions of key figures in the history of philosophy, literature, politics, and theology, including Nietzsche, Heidegger, Camus, and Mishima. While suggesting that there ultimately is no solution to the problem of nihilism, Marmysz proposes a way of utilizing the anxiety and despair that is associated with the problem as a spur toward liveliness, activity, and the celebration of life.
Download or read book Absurdity and Meaning in Contemporary Philosophy and Jewish Thought written by Alan L. Mittleman and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2023-09-30 with total page 299 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Will appeal to thoughtful readers who ponder the 'big question' of the meaning of life. It explores the question both in a philosophical way and through using classical and contemporary Jewish texts. Both philosophy and Judaism run into ineliminable doubt. This shared circumstance can promote honest dialogue.
Download or read book Humanism Antitheodicism and the Critique of Meaning in Pragmatist Philosophy of Religion written by Sami Pihlström and published by Rowman & Littlefield. This book was released on 2023-03-20 with total page 257 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Arguing, humanistically, that we live in a "human world" inescapably colored by meaning, this book shows why the pursuit of meaningfulness is not ethically innocent but must be subjected to critique. Pragmatist critique of meaning both embraces critical humanism and rejects theodicies postulating ultimate meaning in suffering.
Download or read book Philosophy in a Meaningless Life written by James Tartaglia and published by Bloomsbury Publishing. This book was released on 2015-12-17 with total page 233 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Philosophy in a Meaningless Life provides an account of the nature of philosophy which is rooted in the question of the meaning of life. It makes a powerful and vivid case for believing that this question is neither obscure nor obsolete, but reflects a quintessentially human concern to which other traditional philosophical problems can be readily related; allowing them to be reconnected with natural interest, and providing a diagnosis of the typical lines of opposition across philosophy's debates. James Tartaglia looks at the various ways philosophers have tried to avoid the conclusion that life is meaningless, and in the process have distanced philosophy from the concept of transcendence. Rejecting all of this, Tartaglia embraces nihilism ('we are here with nothing to do'), and uses transcendence both to provide a new solution to the problem of consciousness, and to explain away perplexities about time and universals. He concludes that with more self-awareness, philosophy can attain higher status within a culture increasingly in need of it.
Download or read book The Meaning of Meaninglessness written by G. Blocker and published by Springer Science & Business Media. This book was released on 2012-12-06 with total page 159 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: What does "meaningless" mean? On the one hand, it signifies simply the absence or lack of meaning. "Zabool" is meaningless just because it doesn't happen to mean anything. "Green flees time lessly" is meaningless, despite a certain semblance of sense, because it runs afoul of certain fundamental rules of linguistic construction. On the other hand, "meaningless" characterizes that peculiar psycho logical state of dread and anxiety much discussed, if not discovered, by the French shortly after the Second World War. The first is primarily linguistic, focusing attention on emotionally neutral questions of linguistic meaning. The second is nonlinguistic, indicating a painful probing of the social psychology of an era, a clinical and literary analysis of 20th century Romanticism. On the one hand, a job for the professional philosopher; on the other hand, a task for the literary critic and the social historian. Is any useful purpose served in trying to combine these two, very different concerns? As the title of this book suggests, I think there is.
Download or read book The Sunny Nihilist written by Wendy Syfret and published by . This book was released on 2022-07-07 with total page 192 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book The Feeling of Meaninglessness written by Viktor Emil Frankl and published by . This book was released on 2010 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In The Feeling of Meaninglessness, Viktor Frankl, the founder of logotherapy, a psychotherapeutic method which focus on a will to meaning as the driving force of human life, takes a look at how the modern condition affects the human search for meaning. In this series of articles and essays, he discusses how many people suffer from pervasive feelings of meaninglessness in their lives, despite the great material comforts of industrial society. He attributes this sense of meaninglessness to a neglect of our existential needs and offers practical insights and guidelines for how to overcome this meaninglessness and regain mental health through engagement with our existential needs and selves.
Download or read book Meaninglessness written by Vlad Dima and published by MSU Press. This book was released on 2022-09-01 with total page 302 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: For too long, the approach to seemingly universal experiences like love, death, and even time in film has been dominated by the Global North. But what if such explorations developed horizontally instead? Drawing from both European and African cultural theorists, including Gilles Deleuze and Wole Soyinka, Vlad Dima invites us to consider what happens to postcolonial African film if we no longer privilege the idea of time. How else might we understand the cinematic image, and how would its meanings change? Meaninglessness: Time, Rhythm, and the Undead in Postcolonial Cinema is a study of meaning and meaninglessness through the figure of the undead, beginning with francophone Africa and extending to postcolonial France. Through the analysis of films like Mati Diop’s Atlantics and Jean-Pierre Bekolo’s Miraculous Weapons, Dima shows how the African cinematic image may produce meaning without any attachment to European time, and how that meaning is connected instead to the philosophy of negritude and to the notion of rhythm. Meaninglessness introduces the concept of the rhythm-sequence as a new way to understand the African moving image.
Download or read book Existence Meaning Excellence written by Andrius Bielskis and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2017-10-17 with total page 206 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book addresses the ‘perennial’ question of the meaning of life from the point of view of a novel interpretation of Aristotle’s teleology. Beginning with the premise that at the core of modernity and modern moral imagination are the entropy of meaning and the sense of meaninglessness, the author critically engages with the work of the post-war existentialists, chiefly that of Albert Camus and Martin Heidegger, to argue that their analyses are unconvincing and that the question of the meaning of being should therefore be approached using different assumptions, based on the notion of flourishing life. From this Aristotelian outlook, Existence, Meaning, Excellence employs Alasdair MacIntyre’s critique of modernity, together with his conceptions of practice and the narrative unity of life and tradition to provide a novel philosophical account of existence, meaning and excellence - an account which is used to contribute to debates (between Kantian and Nietzschean perspectives) on the nature of art and genius, with Mozart’s genius being used by way of illustration. A fascinating and powerfully argued engagement with existentialist thought that draws on the ‘virtue’ tradition to explore questions of meaning, as well as wider questions within philosophy, this book will appeal to philosophers and social theorists with interests in existentialism, moral philosophy and accounts of ‘the good’ based on the notions of human flourishing.
Download or read book Is Human Life Absurd A Philosophical Inquiry into Finitude Value and Meaning written by Raymond Angelo Belliotti and published by BRILL. This book was released on 2019-06-24 with total page 211 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Belliotti unravels the paradoxes of human existence to reveal paths for crafting meaningful, significant, valuable, even important lives. He argues that human life is not inherently absurd; examines the implications of mortality; contrasts subjective and objective meaning, and evaluates contemporary renderings of meaningful human lives.
Download or read book Philosophy and Temporality from Kant to Critical Theory written by Espen Hammer and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2011-03-31 with total page 271 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book is a critical analysis of how key philosophers in the European tradition have responded to the emergence of a modern conception of temporality. Espen Hammer suggests that it is a feature of Western modernity that time has been forcibly separated from the natural cycles and processes with which it used to be associated. In a discussion that ranges over Kant, Hegel, Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, Heidegger and Adorno, he examines the forms of dissatisfaction which result from this, together with narrative modes of configuring time, the relationship between agency and temporality, and possible challenges to the modern world's linear and homogenous experience of time. His study is a rich exploration of an enduring philosophical theme: the role of temporality in shaping and reshaping modern human affairs.
Download or read book The Banalization of Nihilism written by Karen L. Carr and published by State University of New York Press. This book was released on 1992-02-06 with total page 208 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: After a historical and conceptual overview of the changing face of nihilism in the last century, Carr examines Nietzsche's diagnosis of nihilism as modernity's major crisis. She then compares the responses to nihilism given by the early Karl Barth and by Richard Rorty. To some, nihilism is losing its crisis connotations and becoming simply an unobjectionable characteristic of human life. Carr argues that this transformation ultimately absolutizes community preference and reflects an increasing inability to criticize and change the existing structures of thought. The author contends that the uncritical acceptance of nihilism, which characterizes much of postmodernism, ironically culminates in its complete opposite—dogmatism.
Download or read book Nothingness and the Meaning of Life written by Nicholas Waghorn and published by Bloomsbury Publishing. This book was released on 2014-08-28 with total page 320 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: What is the meaning of life? Does anything really matter? In the past few decades these questions, perennially associated with philosophy in the popular consciousness, have rightly retaken their place as central topics in the academy. In this major contribution, Nicholas Waghorn provides a sustained and rigorous elucidation of what it would take for lives to have significance. Bracketing issues about ways our lives could have more or less meaning, the focus is rather on the idea of ultimate meaning, the issue of whether a life can attain meaning that cannot be called into question. Waghorn sheds light on this most fundamental of existential problems through a detailed yet comprehensive examination of the notion of nothing, embracing classic and cutting-edge literature from both the analytic and Continental traditions. Central figures such as Heidegger, Carnap, Wittgenstein, Nozick and Nagel are drawn upon to anchor the discussion in some of the most influential discussion of recent philosophical history. In the process of relating our ideas concerning nothing to the problem of life's meaning, Waghorn's book touches upon a number of fundamental themes, including reflexivity and its relation to our conceptual limits, whether religion has any role to play in the question of life's meaning, and the nature and constraints of philosophical methodology. A number of major philosophical traditions are addressed, including phenomenology, poststructuralism, and classical and paraconsistent logics. In addition to providing the most thorough current discussion of ultimate meaning, it will serve to introduce readers to philosophical debates concerning the notion of nothing, and the appendix engaging religion will be of value to both philosophers and theologians.
