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Sep 16, 2024 · What makes for a meaningful life? Social psychologist Brian S. Lowery explores three ideas tied to the experience of meaning and shows why simply pursuing personal achievements isn't the...
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- TED
Yale professor and author of “Life Worth Living” Miroslav Volf is sharing his lessons in finding joy and focusing on what matters most to live a meaningful life.
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- TODAY
Apr 27, 2015 · The meaning of life isn’t impossible to define. It’s all about communication, understanding and service. Enjoying our Youtube videos? Get full access to all ...
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- The School of Life
- A God-Given Gift
- Precious Rationality
- Time to Be Unreasonable
- The Value of Human Life
A lot of the value we attribute to human life comes from religion. Even if you or your country are not explicitly religious, the traditions, legal codes, and values you hold stem, at least indirectly, from religion. If we believe a human being is ensouled in some way, or that we’re the loved and cherished children of some all-powerful deity, then i...
The sanctity of human life has great purchase across almost all world religions. However, when you remove religion, what philosophical arguments are left? For millennia, the answer owed much to Aristotle. According to Aristotle, there was only one true “good” in the universe: A being that satisfies its purpose (or telos). He believed everything sho...
Today, few secular thinkers give much weight to natural law. It’s not hard to see why. For however much Aquinas and Islamic scholars elevated rationality, the idea of “truths” and “moral absolutes” as written down in the fabric of the universe depend on certain metaphysical commitments, i.e. a god or spirit which created them. We also live in an ag...
Why, then, do we continue to value human life, especially above and beyond animals? If you value rationality, why is that? And does rationality, alone, bestow value on a human life? Broadly speaking, there are two kinds of value. One is instrumental value, which is value for what something does. The other is inherent value, which is valuable becaus...
- 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.
Oct 2, 2023 · Happiness. What Is the Purpose of Life? Why are we here? Here's a reasonable answer. Updated October 2, 2023 | Reviewed by Jessica Schrader. Key points. Existence is a cosmic lottery we've won....
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Mar 29, 2023 · By Drew Weisholtz. It’s a question that has vexed the human race throughout time: How can you live a life filled with meaning? Yale University theology professor Miroslav Volf attempts to...
