An Investigation of Conditions for the Meaning of Life (original) (raw)
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God’s Goodness, Divine Purpose, and the Meaning of Life
European Journal for Philosophy of Religion, 2022
The divine purpose theory (DPT)—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 (DCT) 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 set of problems for the DPT. Further, the argument can be extended to any account of meaningfulness according to which the value of what humans do can only be conferred by God. Thus, it would seem that there is no tenable version of the view that meaningfulness is conferred on human life by some act or attitude of God’s.
Meaning in Life and Why It Matters
Philosophical models of human motivation tend to fall into two categories. Egoistic models conceive of human beings as moved and guided exclusively by what they take to be in their own self-interest. Dualistic models hold that people are capable of being moved not only by self-interest, but by something 'higher' as well. Thus, Kant, for example, famously thought that in addition to being subject to inclinations, people are capable of being moved and directed by reason alone. Closely linked to these two sorts of descriptive models of human motivation are prescriptive or normative models of practical reason. The descriptive thesis of psychological egoism, which holds that people exclusively do seek their own good is closely connected to (and frequently confused with) the normative thesis of rational egoism, which holds that people should do this if they are to be considered rational. Corresponding to the dual conception of human motivation we find a dual conception of practical reason. Sidgwick, for example, held that two perspectives offer people equally valid reasons to act-an egoistic perspective, which issues recommendations of what is most in an agent's self-interest, and an impersonal
PERCEPTION AND PERPLEXITY OF THE MEANING OF LIFE
The question whether life has any meaning is difficult to interpret. This is the big question-the hardest to answer, the most urgent and at the same time the most obscure. The more we concentrate our critical faculty on it the more it seems to elude us, or to evaporate as any intelligible question. 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 article by tracing the right sense of the quest under the first title to avoid ambiguity and by presenting the significance of the question and basic categories of the answer.
Understanding “Meaning of life” in Terms of Reasons for Action
The Journal of Value Inquiry, 2017
explains in his Stanford Encyclopedia entry on ''The Meaning of Life'' that when the topic of the meaning of life comes up, people often pose one of two questions. They ask: ''So, what is the meaning of life?'' or ''What are you talking about?'' The literature, Metz says, can be divided in terms of which question it seeks to answer. In his entry, Metz's focus is clearly on the first, substantive, question, while he only briefly discusses the meaning of the meaning question. One might think that Metz covers this abstract question quickly and then moves on to the substantive question, because it is fairly clear how the question about the meaning of life is to be understood. This, however, is not the case. Metz's brief overview of attempts to understand the meaning of the question shows that nobody has been able so far to identify a single, primary sense of ''life's meaning''. Therefore Metz considers it highly unlikely that those who are telling us what the meaning of life is answer the same question. What is more, it is even unclear whether ''the field is united in virtue of addressing certain overlapping but not equivalent ideas'' or whether, instead, the field is ''a grab-bag of heterogenous ideas''. 1 Metz then goes on, like most authors in this field, without bothering very much about this conceptual darkness.
Meaning in Life and Objective Well-being
In this article, I reply to a critical notice of my book, Meaning in Life: An Analytic Study, that Stephen Kershnar has published elsewhere in this issue of Science, Religion & Culture. Beyond expounding the central conclusions of the book, Kershnar advances two major criticisms of it, namely, first, that I did not provide enough evidence that meaning in life is a genuine value-theoretic category as something distinct from and competing with, say, objective well-being, and, second, that, even if there were a value of meaning in life, my fundamentality theory of it would not capture it well. Here I respond to both of these criticisms, aiming to probe these underexplored issues still more deeply. I also contend that these two criticisms are in tension with each other; in order to contend that my theory of meaning is incorrect, Kershnar must draw on intuitions about the existence of meaning that undercut his suggestion that there is no such thing.
Critique of an Argument for the Reality of Purpose
Prolegomena: Journal of Philosophy 11.1: 25-34., 2012
Schueler has argued, against the eliminativist, that human purposive action cannot be an illusion because the concept of purpose is not theoretical. He argues that the concept is known directly to be instantiated, through self-awareness; and that to maintain that the concept is theoretical involves an infinite regress. I show that Schueler’s argument fails because all our concepts are theoretical in the sense that we may be mistaken in applying them to our experience. As a consequence, it is conceivable that direct introspection of an event as a purposive action may be mistaken. I indicate ways in which the eliminativist may be able to explain why our perception and introspection is afflicted with systematic error.
On the Objective Meaningful Life Argument: A Response to Kirk Lougheed
Dialogue, 2017
Kirk Lougheed has argued that the Objective Meaningful Life Argument establishes a type of anti-theism, the view that a theistic God’s existence would make things worse and thus it’s rational to prefer that God not exist. The objective version of this argument is said to be an improvement over my subjective version of the Meaningful Life Argument. I argue that Lougheed’s version fares no better than the subjective version.
The question of the meaning and meaningfulness 1 of life has come to be neglected by today's philosophers. Meaning is implicitly assumed to be associated with individual choices and preferences. This article sets out by arguing that meaningfulness works in another way as well. It points out that we are appealed by something that provokes meaningfulness. The article then elaborates on the consequences of this vision, one of these being that there may well be implicit 'standards'. Some authors writing on meaningfulness or related subjects indeed believe that this is the case, but the point made here is that certain benchmarks -i.e. references concerned with our 'being-in-the-world' -have not been explored fully enough.