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May 25, 2021 · Life is meaningless after all, say philosophers. If another year of shutdowns, social restrictions, health risks and existential dread has eroded your sense of life’s ultimate meaning and ...
Existential nihilism is the philosophical theory that life has no objective meaning or purpose. [1] The inherent meaninglessness of life is largely explored in the philosophical school of existentialism, where one can potentially create their own subjective "meaning" or "purpose". The supposed conflict between our desire for meaning and the ...
Oct 3, 2021 · Key points. An individual life may seem more or less meaningful depending on how it is lived, but even the most meaningful lives will end and be forgotten. Jean-Paul Sartre said that the moment we ...
Aug 20, 2020 · A man once said, “My life has been meaningless.”. You might be surprised to know that he was a researcher who helped confirm schizophrenia’s genetic roots. That has been one of psychology's ...
- 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.
Jan 17, 2019 · Here I present a new argument in support of meaning-compatibilism, or the view that life can indeed be meaningful without our having deep free agency. I show that this argument secures meaning-compatibilism more effectively than an argument provided by Derk Pereboom. In the process, we learn that Susan Wolf’s hybrid theory of meaning in life ...
Apr 5, 2016 · While not a comprehensive survey, this chapter clearly articulates what Tartaglia thinks is wrong with many of the existing attempts to argue that life has meaning. He compares life to a game of chess and the idea that life has meaning to the possibility of achieving checkmate, which may motivate a person's moves in the game.