This is a test
- 144 pages
- English
- ePUB (mobile friendly)
- Available on iOS & Android
eBook - ePub
On the Meaning of Life
Book details
Book preview
Table of contents
Citations
About This Book
The question 'What is the meaning of life?' is one of the most fascinating, oldest and most difficult questions human beings have ever posed themselves. In an increasingly secularized culture, it remains a question to which we are ineluctably and powerfully drawn.
Drawing skillfully on a wealth of thinkers, writers and scientists from Augustine, Descartes, Freud and Camus, to Spinoza, Pascal, Darwin, and Wittgenstein, On the Meaning of Life breathes new vitality into one of the very biggest questions.
Frequently asked questions
At the moment all of our mobile-responsive ePub books are available to download via the app. Most of our PDFs are also available to download and we're working on making the final remaining ones downloadable now. Learn more here.
Both plans give you full access to the library and all of Perlegoâs features. The only differences are the price and subscription period: With the annual plan youâll save around 30% compared to 12 months on the monthly plan.
We are an online textbook subscription service, where you can get access to an entire online library for less than the price of a single book per month. With over 1 million books across 1000+ topics, weâve got you covered! Learn more here.
Look out for the read-aloud symbol on your next book to see if you can listen to it. The read-aloud tool reads text aloud for you, highlighting the text as it is being read. You can pause it, speed it up and slow it down. Learn more here.
Yes, you can access On the Meaning of Life by John Cottingham in PDF and/or ePUB format, as well as other popular books in Philosophy & Philosophy History & Theory. We have over one million books available in our catalogue for you to explore.
Information
Notes
1 THE QUESTION
1 Douglas Adams, The Hitchhikerâs Guide to the Galaxy (London: Pan Books, 1979), pp. 135â6.
2 Ludwig Wittgenstein, Tractatus Logico Philosophicus [1922] (London: Routledge, 1961), 6.521.
3 Aristotle, Metaphysics [c. 330BC], Book I, Ch. 2; cf. Francis Bacon, The Advancement of Learning [1605], I, i. 3.
4 For being as an issue, see Martin Heidegger, Being and Time [Sein und Zeit, 1927] trans. J. Macquarrie and E. Robinson (New York: Harper and Row, 1962), §9; for the âmarvel of marvelsâ, see Heideggerâs âWhat is Metaphysicsâ [âWas ist Metaphysic?â], inaugural lecture of 1929.
5 Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, Monadology [1714], §69.
6 A. E. Housman, âTell me not here, it needs not sayingâ, from Last Poems [1922], XL.
7 Wittgenstein, Tractatus, 6.52.
8 Stephen Hawking, A Brief History of Time (London: Bantam Press, 1988), p. 193.
9 Aristotle, Physics [c. 325bc], Book II, Ch. 8. The terms âmaterialâ, âformalâ, âefficientâ and âfinalâ are not in fact Aristotleâs own labels, but are derived from the Latin translations of his works.
10 René Descartes, Meditations [Meditationes de prima philosophia, 1641], Fifth Replies, in J. Cottingham et al. (eds), The Philosophical Writings of Descartes (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985), Vol. II, p. 258.
11 David Hume, An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding [1748], Section IV, part 1; in L. A. Selby-Bigge (ed.) Humeâs Enquiries, rev. P. H. Nidditch (Oxford: Clarendon, 1975), p. 30.
12 Hume, loc. Cit.
13 Hawking, A Brief History of Time, pp. 192â3.
14 Cf. Wittgenstein, Tractatus, 6.4312.
15 For metaphor as a privileged mode of disclosure, see D. Cooper, Metaphor (Oxford: Blackwell, 1986), p. 256.
16 For ânauseaâ, see Jean-Paul Sartre, La NausĂ©e [1936], passim, and LâĂtre et le NĂ©ant [1943], trans. as Being and Nothingness (London: Methuen, 1957), p. 338. For âthrownnessâ (Geworfenheit), see Heidegger, Being and Time, §29, §38.
17 Albert Einstein, Mein Weltbild (Amsterdam: Querido, 1934), trans. S. Bargmann, Ideas and Opinions by Albert Einstein, (New York: Crown), p. 11 (emphasis supplied).
18 Sigmund Freud, Civilisation and its Discontents [Das Unbehagen in der Kultur 1930], Ch. 2; in J. Strachey (ed.), Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud (London: Hogarth, l953â74), XXI, p. 76.
19 Letter to Marie Bonaparte of 13 August 1937; in Letters of Sigmund Freud, trans. T. and J. Stern (New York: Basic Books, 1960).
20 Freud, Civilisation and its Discontents, Ch. 1.
21 Though of course it so far remains an open question whether a religious stance does constitute an âappropriateâ way of coming to terms with our vulnerability.
22 St Bonaventure, Commentarii Sententiarum Petri Lombardi [1248â55], Book I, 1 iii 2, in Opera Omnia (Collegium S. Bonaventurae: Quarachhi, 1891) I, 40. The theme appears earlier, for example in Augustine, Confessions [Confessiones, 400], Book I.
23 Ivan, in Fyodor Dostoevsky, The Brothers Karamazov [1880].
24 Friedrich Nietzsche, The Will to Power [Der Wille zur Macht, 1888], trans. W. Kaufmann and R. J. Hollingdale (New York: Random House, 1975), p. 327.
25 Friedrich Nietzsche, The Joyful Science [Die Fröhliche Wissenschaft, 1882], §125; trans. in W. Kaufmann (ed.), The Portable Nietzsche (New York: Viking, 1954), pp. 93ff.
26 Nietzsche, The Joyful Science, §108.
27 See Richard Dawkins, River out of Eden: A Darwinian View of Life (New York: Basic Books, 1995).
28 The Joyful Science, §125.
29 The Joyful Science, §341. For the existential (rather than literal) construal of the eternal recurrence, see B. Magnus and K. M. Higgins, âNietzscheâs works and their themesâ, in their edited collection The Cambridge Companion to Nietzsche (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), pp. 37ff.
30 The Joyful Science, §341.
31 Everything that man esteems
Endures a moment or a day.
Loveâs pleasure drives his love away,
The painterâs brush consumes his dreams;
The heraldâs cry, the soldierâs tread
Exhaust his glory and his might:
Whatever flames upon the night
Manâs own resinous heart has fed.
(W. B. Yeats, âTwo Songs from a Playâ, The Tower [1928])
The final couplet is connected with the Nietzschean vision by Richard Rorty in the Times Literary Supplement no. 5044 (December 3, 1999), p. 11.
32 Plato, Theaetetus [c.370bc], 160D.
33 Psalm 100.
34 Richard Rorty, Consequences of Pragmatism (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1982), p. xlii.
35 The Joyful Science, §283.
36 Isaiah Berlin, âJohn Stuart Mill and the Ends of Lifeâ, in Four Essays on Liberty (London: Oxford University Press, 1969).
37 It should be added that even when we use âthinâ concepts (âthis object is goodâ, âthat action is rightâ), our evaluations are still typically grounded in objectively assessable features of the objects or actions in virtue of which they are held to be good or right.
38 Sigmund Freud, Introductory Lectures on Psychoanalysis [1916â17], Lecture XVII.
39 John Kekes, Pluralism in Philosophy: Changing the Subject (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2000), p. 97.
40 Simon Raven, The Feathers of Death (London: Anthony Blond, 1959), Ch. 1.
41 For the âGauguin problemâ, see Bernard Williams, Moral Luck (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981), Ch. 2.
42 David Hume, An Enquiry Concerning the Principles of Morals [1751], Section V, part 2.
43 Immanuel Kant, Groundwork of the Metaphysic of Morals [Grundlegung zur Metaphysik der Sitten, 1785], Ch. 2.
44 See John Cottingham, âThe ethics of self-concernâ, Ethics no. 101 (July 1991), pp. 798â817.
45 Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics [c. 330bc], Book VI, Ch. 13.
46 This is not to suggest that meaningfulness always requires explicit reflection on how this integration is achieved, merely that such an integrative story is in principle available.
2 THE BARRIER TO MEANING
1 âJe vois ces effroyables espaces de lâunivers qui mâenferment, et je
me trouve attaché à un coin de cette vaste étendue, sans que je
sache pourquoi je suis plutĂŽt placĂ© en ce lieu quâen un autre, ni
pourquoi ce peu de temps qui mâest donnĂ© Ă vivre mâest assignĂ© Ă
ce point plutĂŽt quâĂ un autre de toute lâĂ©ternitĂ© qui mâa prĂ©cĂ©dĂ©, et
de toute celle qui me suit. Je ne vois que des infinités de toutes
parts, qui mâenferment comme un atome, et comme une ombre
qu ne dure quâun instant sans retour. Tout ce que je connais est que
je dois bientĂŽt mourir, mais ce que jâignore le plus est cette mort
mĂȘme que je ne saurais Ă©viter.â
(Blaise Pascal, Pensées [c. 1660], ed. L. Lafuma
(Paris: Editions du Seuil, 1962), no. 427)
(Paris: Editions du Seuil, 1962), no. 427)
2 It has become fashionable to say that such intelligibility depends on our ability to construct a narrative account of our lives; yet since not just any narrative can command our allegiance as providing a meaningful story, the power of narrative seems dependent on prior notions of value and meaning, rather than being itself generative of those notions. See John D. Arras, âNarrative Ethicsâ, in L. and C. Becker (eds), Encyclopedia of Ethics (2nd edn, New York: Routledge, 2001).
3 To avoid misunderstanding, objectivity need not imply a rigid inflexibility. Objectivist accounts of value can perfectly well allow that different cultural, social and economic circumstances may call for different customs and arrangements (for example for differing sexual mores or differing systems for the raising of children). For this point, see P. Bloomfield, Mor...
Table of contents
- Cover Page
- Title Page
- Copyright Page
- Preface
- One: The Question
- Two: The Barrier to Meaning
- Three: Meaning, Vulnerability and Hope
- Notes