The Death of God and the Meaning of Life
The Death of God and the Meaning of Life

Author: Julian Young

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2014-05-16

Total Pages: 262

ISBN-13: 1135020906

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What is the meaning of life? In today's secular, post-religious scientific world, this question has become a serious preoccupation. But it also has a long history: many major philosophers have thought deeply about it, as Julian Young so vividly illustrates in this thought-provoking second edition of The Death of God and the Meaning of Life. Three new chapters explore Søren Kierkegaard’s attempts to preserve a Christian answer to the question of the meaning of life, Karl Marx's attempt to translate this answer into naturalistic and atheistic terms, and Sigmund Freud’s deep pessimism about the possibility of any version of such an answer. Part 1 presents an historical overview of philosophers from Plato to Marx who have believed in a meaning of life, either in some supposed ‘other’ world or in the future of this world. Part 2 assesses what happened when the traditional structures that give life meaning began to erode. With nothing to take their place, these structures gave way to the threat of nihilism, to the appearance that life is meaningless. Young looks at the responses to this threat in chapters on Nietzsche, Heidegger, Sartre, Camus, Foucault and Derrida. Fully revised and updated throughout, this highly engaging exploration of fundamental issues will captivate anyone who’s ever asked themselves where life’s meaning (if there is one) really lies. It also makes a perfect historical introduction to philosophy, particularly to the continental tradition.

God and the Meanings of Life
God and the Meanings of Life

Author: T. J. Mawson

Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing

Published: 2016-10-20

Total Pages: 240

ISBN-13: 1474212573

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Some philosophers have thought that life could only be meaningful if there is no God. For Sartre and Nagel, for example, a God of the traditional classical theistic sort would constrain our powers of self-creative autonomy in ways that would severely detract from the meaning of our lives, possibly even evacuate our lives of all meaning. Some philosophers, by contrast, have thought that life could only be meaningful if there is a God. God and the Meanings of Life is interested in exploring the truth in both these schools of thought, seeking to discover what God could and couldn't do to make life meaningful (as well as what he would and wouldn't do). Mawson espouses a version of the 'amalgam' or 'pluralism' thesis about the issue of life's meaning – in essence, that there are a number of different legitimate meanings of 'meaning' (and indeed 'life') in the question of life's meaning. According to Mawson, God, were he to exist, would help make life meaningful in some of these senses and hinder in some others. He argues that whilst there could be meaning in a Godless universe, there could be other sorts of meaning in a Godly one and that these would be deeper.

Death and the Meaning of Life
Death and the Meaning of Life

Author: graf Leo Tolstoy

Publisher: Nova Publishers

Published: 2000

Total Pages: 130

ISBN-13: 9781560727040

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Presents materials that reveal the essence of Tolstoy's beliefs on immortality, death, God, and the meaning of life. Contains two booklets ("About Immortality" No. 751 and "About Death" No. 752) compiled by Tolstoy comprising quotations from various philosophers explaining the meaning that death gives to life; essays explaining the actions that Tolstoy thought must be taken to grow spiritually; and finally, diary entries (translated here for the first time in English) pertaining to spiritual themes made during the last year of Tolstoy's life.

What's It All About?
What's It All About?

Author: Julian Baggini

Publisher: Granta Publications

Published: 2013-07-11

Total Pages: 179

ISBN-13: 1847089208

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“Secular-minded readers seeking an alternative to The Purpose-Driven Life have an excellent starting point here.”—Publishers Weekly For readers who are serious about confronting the big issues in life—but are turned off by books which deal with them through religion, spirituality, or psychobabble, this is an honest, intelligent discussion by a philosopher that doesn't hide from the difficulties or make undeliverable promises. It aims to help the reader understand the overlooked issues behind the obvious questions, and shows how philosophy does not so much answer them as help provide us with the resources to answer them for ourselves. “Useful and provocative.”—The Wall Street Journal “Looking for a clear guide to what contemporary philosophy has to say about the meaning of life? Baggini takes us through all the plausible answers, weaving together Kierkegaard, John Stuart Mill, Monty Python, and Funkadelic in an entertaining but always carefully reasoned discussion.”—Peter Singer, author of How Are We To Live “The question of the meaning of life has long been a byword for pretentious rambling. It takes some nerve to tackle it in a brisk and no-nonsense fashion.”—New Statesman

Value and Virtue in a Godless Universe
Value and Virtue in a Godless Universe

Author: Erik J. Wielenberg

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Published: 2005-02-07

Total Pages: 262

ISBN-13: 1139444697

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Suppose there is no God. This might imply that human life is meaningless, that there are no moral obligations and hence people can do whatever they want, and that the notions of virtue and vice and good and evil have no place. Erik J. Wielenberg believes this view to be mistaken and in this book he explains why. He argues that even if God does not exist, human life can have meaning, we do have moral obligations, and virtue is possible. Naturally, the author sees virtue in a Godless universe as different from virtue in a Christian universe, and he develops naturalistic accounts of humility, charity, and hope. The moral landscape in a Godless universe is different from the moral landscape in a Christian universe, but it does indeed exist. Value and Virtue in a Godless Universe is a tour of some of the central landmarks of this under-explored territory.

Nietzsche's Philosophy of Religion
Nietzsche's Philosophy of Religion

Author: Julian Young

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Published: 2006-04-06

Total Pages: 4

ISBN-13: 1107320879

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In his first book, The Birth of Tragedy, Nietzsche observes that Greek tragedy gathered people together as a community in the sight of their gods, and argues that modernity can be rescued from 'nihilism' only through the revival of such a festival. This is commonly thought to be a view which did not survive the termination of Nietzsche's early Wagnerianism, but Julian Young argues, on the basis of an examination of all of Nietzsche's published works, that his religious communitarianism in fact persists through all his writings. What follows, it is argued, is that the mature Nietzsche is neither an 'atheist', an 'individualist', nor an 'immoralist': he is a German philosopher belonging to a German tradition of conservative communitarianism - though to claim him as a proto-Nazi is radically mistaken. This important reassessment will be of interest to all Nietzsche scholars and to a wide range of readers in German philosophy.

David Strauss: The Confessor and the Writer
David Strauss: The Confessor and the Writer

Author: Friedrich Nietzsche

Publisher: Good Press

Published: 2021-04-10

Total Pages: 72

ISBN-13:

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"David Strauss: the Confessor and the Writer" attacks David Strauss's "The Old and the New Faith: A Confession," which Nietzsche holds up as an example of the German thought of the time. He paints Strauss's "New Faith"— a scientifically-determined universal mechanism based on the progression of history—as a vulgar reading of history in the service of a degenerate culture. Nietzsche polemically attacks not only the book but also Strauss as a Philistine of pseudo-culture.

A Significant Life
A Significant Life

Author: Todd May

Publisher: University of Chicago Press

Published: 2015-04-02

Total Pages: 210

ISBN-13: 022623570X

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“A tour de force. It is a thoughtful, subtle, beautifully written discussion of what it takes to live a meaningful life.” —Barry Schwartz, author of The Paradox of Choice Throughout history most of us have looked to faith, relationships, or deeds to give our lives purpose. But in A Significant Life, philosopher Todd May offers an exhilarating new way of thinking about meaning, one deeply attuned to life as it actually is: a work in progress, a journey—and often a narrative. Offering moving accounts of his own life alongside rich engagements with philosophers from Aristotle to Heidegger, he shows us where to find the significance of our lives: in the way we live them. May starts by looking at the fundamental fact that life unfolds over time, and as it does so, it begins to develop certain qualities, certain themes. Our lives can be marked by intensity, curiosity, perseverance, or many other qualities that become guiding narrative values. These values lend meanings to our lives that are distinct from—but also interact with—the universal values we are taught to cultivate, such as goodness or happiness. Offering a fascinating examination of a broad range of figures—from music icon Jimi Hendrix to civil rights leader Fannie Lou Hamer, from cyclist Lance Armstrong to The Portrait of a Lady’s Ralph Touchett to Claus von Stauffenberg, a German officer who tried to assassinate Hitler—May shows that narrative values offer a rich variety of criteria by which to assess a life, specific to each of us and yet widely available. They offer us a way of reading ourselves, who we are, and who we might like to be.

Religion and the Meaning of Life
Religion and the Meaning of Life

Author: Clifford Williams

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Published: 2020-04-09

Total Pages: 197

ISBN-13: 1108421563

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Explores life's meaning through the lens of belief in God and lived realities including boredom, denial of death, and suicide.

The Meaning of Life and Death
The Meaning of Life and Death

Author: Michael Hauskeller

Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing

Published: 2019-09-19

Total Pages: 257

ISBN-13: 1350073660

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What is the point of living? If we are all going to die anyway, if nothing will remain of whatever we achieve in this life, why should we bother trying to achieve anything in the first place? Can we be mortal and still live a meaningful life? Questions such as these have been asked for a long time, but nobody has found a conclusive answer yet. The connection between death and meaning, however, has taken centre stage in the philosophical and literary work of some of the world's greatest writers: Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Leo Tolstoy, Soren Kierkegaard, Arthur Schopenhauer, Herman Melville, Friedrich Nietzsche, William James, Ludwig Wittgenstein, Marcel Proust, and Albert Camus. This book explores their ideas, weaving a rich tapestry of concepts, voices and images, helping the reader to understand the concerns at the heart of those writers' work and uncovering common themes and stark contrasts in their understanding of what kind of world we live in and what really matters in life.