The Meaning of Life

Many of us have good reasons for doing this or that, making this decision rather than that, choosing this path over another. There is often a point to these choices that we can identify and sometimes have thought hard about. But is there a point to life as a whole? That is the question about the meaning of life. Though the question is notoriously hard to make precise, one way or another it has animated much literature and art, and also much philosophy. Some philosophers have provided very disheartening answers to the questions of whether life has meaning, including that life is suffering and then it ends; life is absurd and never gains any meaning; life is all about creating hell for each other and we cannot escape. But other philosophers have provided more uplifting answers. Both kinds of answers deserve serious scrutiny. Such scrutiny should be of interest to anybody who wishes to make reflection on their life as a whole part of their education. After reviewing a number of pessimistic and more optimistic approaches to the meaning of life we also turn to the subject of death. We all die eventually. We normally encounter death among family and friends before we have to deal with our own. These themes too are the subject of philosophical reflection. The course finishes with a discussion of an important set of lectures on the topics of this course by a contemporary philosopher. This course is quite wide-ranging and integrates historical figures and references to art and literature as appropriate, but its main focus is on contributions by relatively recent thinkers in the Anglo-American analytical tradition of philosophy. The methodology of this course is philosophical. Some of the topics may touch you quite personally and you should take this into account before enrolling.