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In what has become a standard distinction in the field, philosophers distinguish two ideas: the meaning of life (M of L) and meaning in life (M in L). Claims like the following are prevalent, “one can find meaning in her life, even if there is no grand, cosmic meaning of life.”.
May 15, 2007 · When the topic of the meaning of life comes up, people tend to pose one of three questions: “What are you talking about?”, “What is the meaning of life?”, and “Is life in fact meaningful?”.
Nov 30, 2021 · Life. First published Tue Nov 30, 2021. Open a textbook in biology and you’ll find a purported definition of life, usually in the form of a list of characteristics that apply to organisms, their parts, their interactions, or their history.
May 15, 2007 · One part of the field of life's meaning consists of the systematic attempt to clarify what people mean when they ask in virtue of what life has meaning. This section addresses different accounts of the sense of talk of “life's meaning” (and of “significance,” “importance,” and other synonyms).
- Existentialism. Existentialism is an approach to philosophy that focuses on the questions of human existence, including how to live a meaningful life in the face of a meaningless universe.
- Absurdism. Absurdism is a philosophy created by Sartre’s one-time friend and later intellectual rival Albert Camus. It is based on the idea that existence is fundamentally absurd and cannot be fully understood through reason.
- Religious existentialism. While the primary existentialist thinkers were all atheists — Nietzsche raised the alarm on nihilism when he declared “God is dead” — the founder of the school was an extremely religious thinker by the name of Søren Kierkegaard.
- Buddhism. Another religious take can be found in the works of Japanese philosopher Keiji Nishitani. Nishitani studied early existentialism under Martin Heidegger, himself a leading existentialist thinker, but provided a Zen Buddhist approach to many of the same problems the existentialists addressed.
In Philosophy in a Meaningless Life, I set out to reaffirm the question of the meaning of life in the face of outdated, positivistic instincts, the scientistic and anti-religious sentiment that pervades much of contemporary
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Dec 1, 2012 · In a town where politics is local sport, Walter Jacobson had a ringside seat, and he shares it in his new book, “Walter’s Perspective: A Memoir of Fifty Years in Chicago TV News.”
