Table of Contents
Iddo Landau: Introduction
I. Understanding Meaning in Life
1. Thaddeus Metz: The Concept of a Meaningful Life
2. Jens Johansson and Frans Svensson: Subjectivism and Objectivism about Meaning in Life
3. Gwen Bradford: Achievement and Meaning in Life
4. Galen Strawson: Narrativity and Meaning in Life
5. Guy Kahane: Meaningfulness and Importance
6. Steve Luper: The Meaning of Life and Death
II. Meaning in Life, Science, and Metaphysics
7. Paul Thagard: The Relevance of Neuroscience to Meaning in Life
8. P. M. S. Hacker: Can Neuroscience Shed Light on What Constitutes a Meaningful Life?
9. Marya Schechtman: Personal Identity and Meaning in Life
10. Derk Pereboom: Hard Determinism and Meaning in Life
11. Ned Markosian: Meaning in Life and the Nature of Time
III. Meaning in Life and Religion
12. John Cottingham: Transcendence and Meaning in Life
13. Erik J. Wielenberg: Atheism and Meaning in Life
14. T. J. Mawson: Theism and Meaning in Life
15. Guy Bennett-Hunter: Mysticism, Ritual, and the Meaning of Life
IV. Ethics and Meaning in Life
16. Todd May: Meaning and Morality
17. Sven Nyholm and Stephen M. Campbell: Meaning and Anti-Meaning in Life
18. Lucy Allais: Forgiveness and Meaning in Life
19. Rivka Weinberg: Between Sisyphus's Rock and a Warm and Fuzzy Place: Procreative Ethics and the Meaning of Life
20. Katie McShane: Nature, Animals, and Meaning in Life
V. Philosophical Psychology and Meaning in Life
21. Antti Kauppinen: The Experience of Meaning
22. Nomy Arpaly: Desire and Meaning in Life: Towards a Theory
23. Alan H. Goldman: Love and Meaning in Life
24. Iddo Landau: Meaning in Life and Phoniness
25. Tony Manela: Gratitude and Meaning in life
26. Roy F. Baumeister Psychological Approaches to Life's Meaning
VI. Living Meaningfully: Challenges and Prospects
27. David Benatar: Pessimism, Optimism, and Meaning in Life
28. Michael Cholbi: The Rationality of Suicide and the Meaningfulness of Life
29. Michael S. Brady: Suffering and Meaning in Life
30. Saul Smilansky: Paradoxes and Meaning in Life
31. Doret de Ruyter and Anders Schinkel: Education and Meaning in Life
32. John Danaher: Virtual Reality and the Meaning in Life
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Synopsis
A topic of universal concern that touches everyone, philosophy of meaning in life has roots in spiritual and religious movements in almost all cultures. Many of the issues dealt with in these movements, such as human vocation, the life worth living, our relation to what is "greater" than us, and our encounters with suffering and with death, are also discussed (even if in a different manner) in the philosophy of meaning in life. However, only recently has the topic received elaborate discussion within analytic philosophy, and become a thriving field of research.
This volume presents thirty-two chapters by leading authorities in their respective subfields on a wide array of subjects in meaning in life research. The chapters are organized into six sections.
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Author Information
Iddo Landau is a Professor of Philosophy at the University of Haifa, Israel. He has published extensively on meaning in life, and is the author of Finding Meaning in an Imperfect World (Oxford University Press, 2017).
Contributors:
Lucy Allais works jointly as Professor of Philosophy at the University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg, and at Johns Hopkins University.
Nomy Arpaly is a Professor of Philosophy at Brown University.
Roy F. Baumeister is a social/personality psychologist and currently president-elect of the International Positive Psychology Association.
David Benatar is Professor of Philosophy at the University of Cape Town, South Africa.
Guy Bennett-Hunter is Executive Editor of the Expository Times at the University of Edinburgh, UK. He is the author of Ineffability and Religious Experience (Routledge, 2014).
Gwen Bradford is Associate Professor of Philosophy at Rice University.
Michael Brady is Professor of Philosophy and Head of the School of Humanities at the University of Glasgow.
Stephen M. Campbell is an Assistant Professor of Philosophy at Bentley University.
Michael Cholbi is Professor of Philosophy at the University of Edinburgh.
John Cottingham is Professor Emeritus of Philosophy at the University of Reading and an Honorary Fellow of St John's College, Oxford.
John Danaher is a Senior Lecturer in the School of Law, NUI Galway, Ireland.
Doret de Ruyter is Professor of Philosophy of Education at the University of Humanistic Studies in Utrecht, the Netherlands.
Alan Goldman is Kenan Professor of Humanities and Professor of Philosophy Emeritus at the College of William & Mary.
Peter Hacker was a tutorial fellow of St John's College, Oxford from 1966-2006, and is currently Emeritus Research Fellow.
Jens Johansson is Professor of Practical Philosophy at Uppsala University, Sweden.
Guy Kahane is Professor of Moral Philosophy at the University of Oxford.
Antti Kauppinen is Professor of Practical Philosophy at the University of Helsinki.
Iddo Landau is a Professor of Philosophy at the University of Haifa, Israel.
Steven Luper is a Professor of Philosophy at Trinity University.
Tony Manela is Assistant Professor of Philosophy at Siena College.
Ned Markosian is a Professor of Philosophy at the University of Massachusetts Amherst.
Tim Mawson is Dean, Edgar Jones Fellow, and Tutor in Philosophy at St Peter's College, University of Oxford.
Todd May is Class of 1941 Memorial Professor of the Humanities at Clemson University.
Katie McShane is a Professor of Philosophy at Colorado State University.
Thaddeus Metz is a Professor of Philosophy at the University of Pretoria, South Africa.
Sven Nyholm is Assistant Professor of Philosophical Ethics at Utrecht University.
Derk Pereboom is the Susan Linn Sage Professor of Philosophy at Cornell University.
Marya Schechtman is Professor of Philosophy and an affiliate of the Laboratory of Integrative Neuroscience at the University of Illinois, Chicago.
Anders Schinkel is Associate Professor of Philosophy of Education at the Vrije Universiteit, Amsterdam, The Netherlands.
Saul Smilansky is a Professor of Philosophy, University of Haifa, Israel.
Galen Strawson is the President's Chair of Philosophy at the University of Texas at Austin.
Frans Svensson is a Senior lecturer of philosophy at the University of Gothenburg, Sweden.
Paul Thagard is Distinguished Professor of Philosophy Emeritus at the University of Waterloo, Canada.
Rivka Weinberg is Professor of Philosophy at Scripps College, Claremont, CA.
Erik J. Wielenberg is Professor of Philosophy at DePauw University.
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"Atheism and Meaning in Life"
in The Oxford Handbook of Meaning in Life
Publication Date
8-2022
Abstract
This chapter takes the case of Sisyphus as a springboard for an examination of meaning in human life under the assumptions that there is no God, there are no non-physicals souls, there is no afterlife, reincarnation never occurs, and each human being’s death marks the permanent end of his or her actions and experiences. Different types of meaning that a life might have are distinguished, most importantly intrinsic meaning and extrinsic meaning, and various sources of meaning in life in a godless universe are identified. These include love, flow, identifying with or working toward something larger than oneself, responding to unavoidable suffering in a certain way, and contributing to social or individual harmony. Following that, some prominent arguments for the view that atheism implies that all human lives are meaningless are critically examined. The conclusion of that discussion is that the claim that atheism entails meaninglessness is implausible.
