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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 ...
Jul 11, 2022 · Nihilism can lead to a feeling of hopelessness; If nihilists believe life is meaningless, they may find it hard to maintain hope or motivation. This can lead to a sense of hopelessness and despair.
Apr 5, 2016 · Given the falsity of nihilism, an explanation for life's meaning that avoids this circularity is required. Such an explanation is provided by Cooper's appeal to the concept of ineffability, which confers meaning on life precisely by referring to a determinately contentless context of meaning, beyond (though intimate with) life itself.
- 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.
When people ask about the meaning of life, there’s a good chance they’re assuming that it consists of a single factor. This idea is the inspiration for countless jokes: the meaning of life is a fountain, a river, a journey, 42, golf, the hokey cokey (because that’s what it’s all about). But most philosophers studying meaning reject this ...
Mar 20, 2018 · Usefulness or worth only comes from the values placed on it. All life is absurd." Such claims, arguing that life in itself, inherently or intrinsically, is meaningless, and that we just insert ...
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 ...
