Category: Meaning of Life
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How Much Value Do You Attach to This Life?
The hour of death has arrived. You are informed by an utterly reliable source that you have exactly two options. You can either accept death and with it utter annihilation of the self, or you can repeat your life with every last detail the same. But if every last detail is to be the same,…
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The View from Mount Zappfe: The Absurdity of Human Life and Intellectual Honesty
Gisle Tangenes describes the life and ideas of a cheerfully pessimistic, mountain-climbing Norwegian existentialist, pessimist, and anti-natalist, Peter Wessel Zapffe: Thus the ‘thousand consolatory fictions’ that deny our captivity in dying beasts, afloat on a speck of dust in the eternal void. And after all, if a godly creator is waiting in the wings, it must be akin…
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Self-Made Meaning is Unmeaning
One can bake bread, buy bread, or beg bread. Can one bake for oneself the bread of meaning? Or must one ask for it? (One cannot buy it.) Some say that the only meaning a life has is the meaning the liver of the life gives it. This is a mistake as I will argue…
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Meaning as Bread
As an addendum to yesterday's Platonizing entry on "Give us this day our daily bread," I draw upon Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger, Introduction to Christianity, trs. Foster and Miller, Ignatius Press, 1969, p. 73, orig. publ. in German in 1968: Meaning is the bread on which man, in the intrinsically human part of his being, subsists.
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Immortality and Meaning
Here at Maverick Philosopher: Strictly Philosophical. Is the brevity of life an argument against its ultimate meaningfulness? Or is rather that case that brevity is necessary for meaning, and that eternal life would be an eternal drag? I draw upon a neglected and no-longer-read philosopher, A. E. Taylor.
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Is St. Paul an Anti-Natalist?
I wrote in Christian Anti-Natalism? (10 November 2017): Without denying that there are anti-natalist tendencies in Christianity that surface in some of its exponents, the late Kierkegaard for example, it cannot be maintained that orthodox Christianity, on balance, is anti-natalist. Ask yourself: what is the central and characteristic Christian idea? It is the Incarnation, the…
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Apologia Pro Vita Mea: A Reply to a Friendly Critic
Vito Caiati responds to yesterday's Could it be like this? In yesterday's post, you write, “So I say: if you have the aptitude and the stamina, you live best by seeking the ultimate truth about the ultimate matters with your whole heart and mind and soul, with everything else you do subordinate to that quest…
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Could it be like this?
I find the following scenario exceedingly strange. We die and become nothing and no question gets answered. Could it be like this? It is epistemically possible, possible for all we know. All we know is damned little. But then what would have been the point of the evolution of animals that pose unanswerable questions? No…
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Fragment of a Credo
I cannot know whether my life makes ultimate sense. But I can live as if it does, and if I do I will live better than if I live as if it does not. I cannot know whether my life is bounded by bodily birth and death. But I can live as if it is…
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How Can Anyone Live for This Life Alone?
This just over the transom: There's a question I've been pondering for some time that I'd like your opinion on if you're willing. I've always been fascinated by people who have been occupied and consumed by the things of the world- power, money, fame, sex, etc. For example, I just finished watching a documentary about…
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A Worthy Life’s Goal
To think as clearly as one can and as deeply as one can about as many ultimate issues as one can for as long as one can.
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A Similar Pattern of Argument in Buddhism and Benatar
On Buddhism the human (indeed the animalic/sentient) condition is a profoundly unsatisfactory predicament from which we need extrication. The First Noble Truth is that fundamentally all is ill, suffering, unsatisfactory, dukkha. That there is some sukha (joy, happiness) along with the dukkha is undeniable, but the little sukha is fleeting and unsatisfying and leads to…
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Is the Quality of Life Objectively Evaluable on Naturalism?
This is the penultimate draft of the paper I will be presenting in Prague at the end of this month at the Benatar conference. Comments are welcome from those who are familiar with this subject. ………………………………………………. IS THE QUALITY OF LIFE OBJECTIVELY EVALUABLE ON NATURALISM? William F. Vallicella Abstract This article examines one of…
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Woody Allen, Meet Reginald Garrigou-Lagrange: Meaning and Desire
To repeat some of what I wrote earlier, According to Woody Allen, we all know that human existence is meaningless and that it ends, utterly and meaninglessly, with death. We all know this, he thinks, but we hide the horrible reality from ourselves with all sorts of evasions and distractions. Worldly people, for example, imagine that they will live…
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A Defense of David Benatar Against a Scurrilous New Criterion Attack
By a defense of Benatar, I do not mean a defense of his deeply pessimistic and anti-natalist views, views to which I do not subscribe. I mean a defense of the courageous practice of unrestrained philosophical inquiry, inquiry that follows the arguments where they lead, even if they issue in conclusions that make people extremely…