Why has the Question of the Meaning of Life Arisen in the Last Two and a Half Centuries?

Landau, Iddo

doi:10.5840/philtoday19974123

Cited by 10 publications

(5 citation statements)

References 0 publications

Supporting

Mentioning

Contrasting

Order By: Relevance

“…But it has turned into a potentially bothering issue on the personal level for an increasing number of people only in the last two or three centuries. [1][2] This may be the result of several trends, such as the rise in the importance of individualism, 3 realization of the imperfect state of the world, and not in the least, the decline of the status of religion as the provider of answers to major questions. 4 Several approaches have been proposed in the behavioral sciences for dealing with the issue of MOL.…”

Section: The Nature and Functions Of The Meaningfulness Of Life Meani...mentioning

confidence: 99%

The Nature and Functions of the Meaningfulness of Life

Kreitler

2022

MRAJ

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

The paper deals with the construct of the meaningfulness of life. After reviewing major theoretical and methodological approaches a new definition of meaningfulness of life is presented, grounded in the theory of meaning. Five different meaning-based assessment methods of meaningfulness of life are presented, each with a definition, major findings, advantages and disadvantages: the subject’s meaning profile, an open-ended examination of the meaning of the meaningfulness of life, overall rating scale of the meaning of the meaningfulness of life, a dimensional questionnaire of the meaningfulness of life, and the four anchors of the meaningfulness of life. The interrelations of the five measures and the manner in which they complement one another in exploring the meaningfulness of life are described. The relations of meaningfulness of life with the individual’s cognitive, emotional and personality tendencies are presented. A special section presents findings in a sample of cancer patients. The conclusions concern the nature and the psychological role of meaningfulness of life.

show abstract

Section: The Nature and Functions Of The Meaningfulness Of Life Meani...mentioning

confidence: 99%

The Nature and Functions of the Meaningfulness of Life

Kreitler

2022

MRAJ

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

show abstract

“…In considering how some ideas expounded well more than 2,000 years ago might bear on twenty-first-century philosophical reflection on life's meaning, it might be that I am imposing "modern" categories on "pre-modern" thought. For instance, some maintain that the question of life's meaning arose only upon the rise of skepticism about the existence of God and objective purposes as well as the influence of mechanistic-scientific explanation (e.g., Landau 1997). However, the book of Ecclesiastes is straightforwardly viewed as raising questions of meaning in life distinct from ones about happiness and without any doubt about the reality of God's will (on which see Metz 2018).…”

Section: N T R O D U C I N G a Way To A P P R Oac H J U Da I S M A N ...mentioning

confidence: 99%

Judaism's Distinct Perspectives on the Meaning of Life

Metz

2021

Journal of Jewish Ethics

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

In contemporary Anglo-American philosophy, there has been substantial debate between religious and secular theorists about what would make life meaningful, with a large majority of the religious philosophers having drawn on Christianity. In this article, in contrast, I draw on Judaism, with the aims of articulating characteristically Jewish approaches to life's meaning, which is a kind of intellectual history, and of providing some support for them relative to familiar Christian and Islamic approaches (salient in the Tanakh, the New Testament, and the Qur'an), which is a more philosophical enterprise. Sometimes I point out that dominant views in contemporary philosophy favor a Jewish approach to meaning relative to rivals, e.g., insofar as Judaism contends that a merely earthly life can be meaningful. Other times I suggest that Judaism provides reason to doubt dominant views in recent analytic philosophy, e.g., to the extent that the former posits a people, not merely a person, as a bearer of meaning.

show abstract

“…Though equally bound up with the human condition and therefore also in a sense a timeless question, the question of life's meaning , unlike the question ‘how to live?’, is at the same time a peculiarly modern question (cf. Landau, ; Baumeister, ; Grondin, ). It does not appear in these terms before the 19th century, and expressions of a search for meaning and of despair about finding meaning occur vastly more frequently in modernity than before…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Both of these things are probably best explained as resulting from certain developments that gave rise to the modern world. As Landau observes, both people's sense that life is (and their lives are) important, and that we are able to understand it, make sense of it, were ultimately undermined by the rise of modern science (, p. 265). In the course of the 17th and 18th centuries, rationalism and the Enlightenment's critical and sceptical spirit spread amongst comparatively large sections of the population, and Newtonian science was popularised for the uneducated.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…They are highly changeable, rather than stable, and they stimulate corresponding qualities in individuals (flexibility, a readiness to change, pragmatism, a relativistic frame of mind); thus, they promote alienation. And the central modern ideal of happiness, understood in terms of comfort, pleasure and fun—itself partly a response to an experienced lack of stable meaning—is bound to disappoint (Landau, , pp. 266–267).…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

See 1 more Smart Citation

Education and Life's Meaning

Schinkel¹,

Ruyter²,

Aviram³

2015

Journal of Philosophy of Education

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

There are deep connections between education and the question of life's meaning, which derive, ultimately, from the fact that, for human beings, how to live-and therefore, how to raise one's children-is not a given but a question. One might see the meaning of life as constitutive of the meaning of education, and answers to the question of life's meaning might be seen as justifying (a particular form of) education. Our focus, however, lies on the contributory relation: our primary purpose is to investigate whether and how education might contribute to children's ability to find meaning in life or at least deal with the question. This issue is not only theoretically interesting (though relatively neglected)-it also has practical urgency. For people have a need for meaning that, if unfulfilled, leads to personal and potentially social crises-a need that often expresses itself first and strongly in adolescence; and there are reasons to have doubts about the contribution of today's traditional formal education system to the meaningfulness of children's (and future adults') lives. We argue for the importance of frameworks of values, as well as for a greater emphasis on the affective dimension of meaning, though we reject pure subjectivism. The underlying purpose of this article, however, is not to argue for a particular comprehensive position, but to persuade philosophers of education of the importance of the issue of life's meaning in thinking about education today.

show abstract

Why has the Question of the Meaning of Life Arisen in the Last Two and a Half Centuries?

Cited by 10 publications

References 0 publications

The Nature and Functions of the Meaningfulness of Life

The Nature and Functions of the Meaningfulness of Life

Judaism's Distinct Perspectives on the Meaning of Life

Education and Life's Meaning

Contact Info

Product

Resources

About