In this article we revisit a number of disputes regarding significance logics---i.e., inferential frameworks capable of handling meaningless, although grammatical, sentences---that took place in a series of articles most of which appeared in the Australasian Journal of Philosophy between 1966 and 1978. These debates concern (i) the way in which logical consequence ought to be approached in the context of a significance logic, and (ii) the way in which the logical vocabulary has to be modified (either by restricting some notions, (...) or by adding some vocabulary) to keep as much of Classical Logic as possible. Our aim is to show that the divisions arising from these disputes can be dissolved in the context of a novel and intuitive proposal that we put forward. (shrink)

Boredom is an affective experience that can involve pervasive feelings of meaninglessness, emptiness, restlessness, frustration, weariness and indifference, as well as the slowing down of time. An increasing focus of research in many disciplines, interest in boredom has been intensified by the recent Covid-19 pandemic, where social distancing measures have induced both a widespread loss of meaning and a significant disturbance of temporal experience. This article explores the philosophical significance of this aversive experience of ‘pandemic boredom.’ Using Heidegger’s work (...) as a unique vantage point, this article draws on survey data collected by researchers in an ongoing project titled ‘Experiences of Social Distancing During the Covid-19 Pandemic’ to give an original phenomenological interpretation of the meaninglessness and monotony of pandemic boredom. On a Heideggerian interpretation, pandemic boredom involves either a situative confrontation with relative meaninglessness that upholds our absorption in the everyday world, or an existential confrontation with absolute meaninglessness that forces us to take up the question of our existence. Arguing that boredom during the pandemic makes this distinction difficult to sustain, I consider some of the ways in which pandemic boredom might be seen to expose and then exceed the distinctive methodological limitations of Heidegger’s philosophical interpretation of boredom. (shrink)

This paper critically engages with the arguments for the meaninglessness of ‘democracy’ and for abandoning use of that word, in Herman Cappelen’s book The Concept of Democracy. It explaining the distinctive nature of Cappelen’s style of argument for abandoning a word. It argues against Cappelen’s case for the meaninglessness of ‘democracy’ and its cognates. It explores an important unclarity in the sort of ethical thesis Cappelen wants to defend in this book. Finally, it suggests that Cappelen’s argument for (...) abandoning ‘democracy’ retains some force despite the criticisms raised. (shrink)

He then tries to show how the concept of meaninglessness, when interpreted in the manner he suggests, can be profitably used by philosophers, despite the many persuasive objections to its use that philosophers have raised in their disputes over it.

I argue that attempts to give philosophical accounts of meaningfulness in life are largely empty since there is no unitary concept to be analysed, and there are no criteria for what will count as success in that project. I suggest that there is a better prospect for giving an account of meaninglessness in life, and that efforts are more usefully directed at this project. I then offer such an account in which it is proposed that what often (but not (...) always) underlies feelings that life is meaningless is a matter of the person concerned finding nothing worth doing, pursuing or aspiring to; that is, their finding nothing to be of value. The account is then modified and expanded, and is found to usefully explain the phenomena of anhedonia, distress and failure of motivation frequently associated with feelings of meaninglessness. The account is not intended as a conceptual analysis, but as an explanation of what is (often) happening when people find life meaningless. The paper concludes with discussions of what may be said about meaningfulness in the light of the offered account of meaninglessness, and of the distinction between life being felt to be meaningless, and life actually being meaningless. (shrink)

David Benatar has been championing the cause of the overall badness of human lives since the turn of the century, most forcefully in his 2006 academic bestseller Better Never to Have Been. In his more recent book, The Human Predicament (OUP, 2017), he added some extra layers of dark paint to his sinister portrait of human destiny by arguing that our lives are not just miserable, but also insignificant, i.e. devoid of (cosmic) meaning and purpose. And yet, just like in (...) Better Never to Have Been, he has once again shunned from taking what appears to be the next logical step from such revelation and concluding that a quick and painless death would be a relief and a blessing for every one of us. And yet, if human life is not only of poor quality but also mostly meaningless, how come death is not (more) welcome? If human life, or existence, is a problem and a burden, how come death, which ends it, is not a solution and a relief? In the paper, I take up this challenge and investigate whether Benatar’s particular blend of existential pessimism and cosmic nihilism can offer a plausible solution for it. (shrink)

What does "meaningless" mean? On the one hand, it signifies simply the absence or lack of meaning. "Zabool" is meaningless just because it doesn't happen to mean anything. "Green flees time lessly" is meaningless, despite a certain semblance of sense, because it runs afoul of certain fundamental rules of linguistic construction. On the other hand, "meaningless" characterizes that peculiar psycho logical state of dread and anxiety much discussed, if not discovered, by the French shortly after the Second World War. The (...) first is primarily linguistic, focusing attention on emotionally neutral questions of linguistic meaning. The second is nonlinguistic, indicating a painful probing of the social psychology of an era, a clinical and literary analysis of 20th century Romanticism. On the one hand, a job for the professional philosopher; on the other hand, a task for the literary critic and the social historian. Is any useful purpose served in trying to combine these two, very different concerns? As the title of this book suggests, I think there is. (shrink)

In this study of Giorgio Agamben's pre-Homo Sacer work, I assess his idea of the ethical subject. Over the course of these early writings, he adopts a Walter Benjamin-inspired redemptive aim as he endeavours to uncover the circumstances of alienated subjectivity and possibility of authentic experience. However, while Agamben borrows from Benjamin to elaborate on the ethical potential of the nihilist pose, a more Kantian conception of idealist autonomy becomes increasingly pronounced. This Kantianism is at odds with the Benjaminian nihilism (...) that guides his redemptive prescription, leaving Agamben's ethical subject mired in a realm of meaningless authenticity. (shrink)

In this paper I explore how we can conceive of communication without recourse to the notion of meaning. The first step is to decouple linguistic understanding from its usual characterization as knowledge of meaning. Instead, I argue that we should think about understanding as a kind of skill or knowledge-how with both a practical and cognitive component. Further, we need to account for the different roles which an expression can play. Essentially, one expression can be understood in different ways with (...) respect to different communicational functions it can fulfill. With the notion of understanding of expressions—competence—in hand, I explain how it relates to the understanding of utterances—comprehension. Since the former is a skill, the latter can be explained as the deployment of that skill to a particular conversational context. Finally, I give an account of communication and discuss the advantages which come from adopting this perspective. (shrink)

What would the world be like if we no longer needed meaning? Australian sociologist Michael Casey's revealing work charts the collapse of the metaphysical world and the innate human need for meaning. With the decline of Christianity and the demise of secular universalism in the west, the meaning and value of metaphysical culture has been replaced by an entirely new post-metaphysical world. In Meaninglessness, Casey revisits the social theory of Nietzsche, Freud, and Rorty, in order to conceive how this (...) post-metaphysical culture may take shape in the third millennium. Framing questions of enduring significance to contemporary social and political theory in a new methodological light, this work will appeal to scholars and general readers interested in sociology, post-modernism, cultural studies, political theory, and philosophy. (shrink)

First, I show that the semantic thesis of scientific realism may be relaxed significantly—to allow that some scientific discourse is not truth-valued—without making any concessions concerning the epistemic or methodological theses that lie at realism’s core. Second, I illustrate how relaxing the semantic thesis allows realists to avoid positing abstract entities and to fend off objections to the “no miracles” argument from positions such as cognitive instrumentalism. Third, I argue that the semantic thesis of scientific realism should be relaxed because (...) it is possible for scientific statements to be partially true, and hence approximately true, without being false. (shrink)

This book combines an account of the autonomy of philosophy with a new theory of consciousness. The account of philosophy is rooted in the question of the meaning of life. This question, it is argued, is neither obscure nor obsolete, but rather reflects an ancient and natural concern to which all other traditional philosophical problems can be squarely related; allowing them to be reconnected with natural sources of interest, and providing a diagnosis of the typical lines of opposition to be (...) found across philosophy’s debates. The question of the meaning of life is answered with nihilism: reality is meaningless. But finding nothing pernicious in this, the author rejects the various strategies devised in the 20th century for evading or coping with nihilism. Nihilism would be false if there were a transcendent context of meaning. But in correctly retreating from this prospect, it is claimed, philosophy erroneously retreated from the concept of transcendence itself. For only in terms of this concept can the contemporary problem of consciousness be solved, thereby avoiding an untenable revisionism: either of our conception of consciousness or the physical world. In terms of the transcendence of consciousness (which has no scientific implications), the author explains how the ‘block universe’ account of time suggested by contemporary physics can be reconciled with a temporal present, and why commitment to universals seems irrevocable. The book concludes that philosophy’s cultural role is to maintain a rational discussion about transcendence, and that through greater self-awareness, it can regain its influence. (shrink)

The problem of suffering crucially focuses on meaninglessness. Meaningful suffering—suffering having some “point” or function—is not as problematic as absurd suffering that cannot be rendered purposeful. This issue is more specific than the problem of the “meaning of life” (or “meaning in life”). Human lives are often full of suffering experienced as serving no purpose whatsoever – indeed, suffering that may threaten to make life itself meaningless. Some philosophers—e.g., D.Z. Phillips and John Cottingham—have persuasively argued that the standard analytic (...) methods of philosophy of religion in particular ought to be enriched by literary reading and interpretation, especially when dealing with issues such as this. The problem of evil and suffering can also be explored from a perspective entangling literary and philosophical approaches (Kivistö & Pihlström, 2016). This double methodology is in this paper applied to the problem of evil and suffering by considering an example drawn from Holocaust literature: Primo Levi’s work is analyzed as developing an essentially ethical argument, with a philosophical-cum-literary structure, against theodicies seeking to render suffering meaningful. By means of such a case study, I hope to shed light on the problem of meaningless suffering, especially regarding the moral critique of “theodicist” attempts to interpret all suffering as meaningful. (shrink)

There is a common assumption that meaninglessness leads to the nihilistic rejection of all values, but that since life without value is impossible, people who suffer from this sort of existential c...

In this essay I consider the argument that Bernard Williams advances in ‘The Makropolus Case’ for the meaninglessness of immortality. I also consider various counter-arguments. I suggest that the more clearly these counter-arguments are targeted at the spirit of Williams's argument, rather than at its letter, the less clearly they pose a threat to it. I then turn to Nietzsche, whose views about the eternal recurrence might appear to make him an opponent of Williams. I argue that, properly interpreted, (...) these views in fact make him an ally. (shrink)

In this paper, I consider the question of whether or not the deflationist about truth can respond to the Liar and allied paradoxes by taking sentences such as the following: (1) (1) is false (2) (2) is not true (3) (3) is true to be meaningless. Let's call this strategy for dealing with the Liar and Liar-like phenomena the Meaningless Strategy. This strategy is intuitively satisfying: it captures many people's initial response to the paradoxes; and it is theoretically important: if (...) successful, it might allow the deflationist to avoid the revenge problem that plagues so many putative solutions to the Liar. Moreover, owing to the austerity of their theory, deflationists have very few resources to deploy in attempting to accommodate the Liar, which means that if the deflationist is in a good position to employ the Meaningless Strategy, so much the better for deflationism. (shrink)

Rights proclamations are often alleged to be meaningless – ‘nonsense upon stilts’. But what makes a rights proclamation meaningful? In general, I argue, meaningful rights proclamations presuppose the existence of both a duty – directed from some party to another – and an interest whose protection is at least a non-redundant element in the justification of why the duty exists. Further conditions of meaningfulness apply for specifically moral rights proclamations. Here, the interest must be of such moral relevance to ground, (...) by itself, the duty and the duty must be demonstrably compatible with other mandatory components of morality. Neither of these conditions applies to rights proclamations in the legal realm. For a legal right proclamation to be meaningful, it is sufficient that there is or there ought to be, in the legal community at stake, a legal obligation whose justification includes, as a non-redundant element, the interest of some party. (shrink)

Against Tartaglia, I argue (1) that life is not necessarily meaningless but it is absurd. It is absurd because our possible disappointment at death is not a disappointment we shall ever actually experience but it is a disappointment we yet fear, now, in life. (2) Tartaglia's idea is that life is meaningless whether we realise it or not but we are better able to realise it when we are bored. Against Tartaglia, it might be argued that the idea is itself (...) a symptom of boredom, ie part of boredom itself. He has isolated meaninglessness in life but not the meaninglessness of life. (shrink)

‘Am I leading a meaningless life?’ is a different and more vulnerable question about meaning in life than the question ‘What activities should I pursue for my life to be a meaningful life?’ Most contemporary philosophy of meaning in life focuses on the latter question and assumes that people live under the lucky circumstances of having a choice regarding the activities they want to pursue. Where it discusses crises of meaning, it conflates the crisis question of what prevents life from (...) being altogether meaningless with the choice question about what activities to pursue. I argue this is a mistake. I discuss Matthew Wong as an example of someone who, judging from the perspective of choice views on meaning in life, seemed to lead an eminently meaningful life, yet who experienced existential crisis. I discuss Etty Hillesum and Sam Galesloot as examples of people who had little to no opportunity to develop activities of the type that choice thinkers espouse, yet who experienced meaningfulness and who many others have recognized as leading meaningful lives. All in all, the crisis and choice questions of meaning in life are separate questions and the crisis question deserves philosophical attention in its own right. (shrink)

While research on meaningfulnesss in life is becoming increasingly popular in analytic philosophy, there is still a dearth of literature on the topic of meaninglessness. This is surprising, given that a better understanding of the nature of meaninglessness may help to illuminate features of meaningfulness previously unobserved or misunderstood. Additionally, the topic of meaninglessness is interesting in its own right - independent of what it can tell us about meaningfulness. In my dissertation, I construct and defend my (...) own conception of meaninglessness. -/- I adopt Thaddeus Metz's (2013) analysis of meaninglessness presented in his new book, Meaning in Life: An Analytic Study. For Metz, meaninglessness is not the absence of meaningfulness but a positively bad state to be in - one that can detract from the overall meaningfulness of a life. I distinguish between the following: negative meaning (i.e., meaninglessness as a dis-value), positive meaning (i.e., meaningfulness), and lives that lack positive meaning. I defend a conception of negative meaning. In contrast, most conceptions of meaninglessness are conceptions of lives where positive meaning is absent. Philosophers defending these conceptions have yet to acknowledge the existence of negative meaning. I explain why conceptions of meaninglessness (as the absence of positive meaning) are inadequate and I provide support for the existence of negative meaning. (shrink)

The views of John Dewey and Kurt Vonnegut are often criticized for opposite reasons: Dewey’s philosophy is said to be naively optimistic while Vonnegut’s work is read as cynical. The standard debates over the views of the two thinkers cause readers to overlook the similarities in the way each approaches tragic experience. This paper examines Dewey’s philosophic account of time and meaning and Vonnegut’s use of time travel in his autobiographical novel Slaughterhouse-Five to illustrate these similarities. This essay demonstrates how (...) both Dewey and Vonnegut embrace the ameliorative possibilities of art for preserving individuality and meaning in the face of tragic experience. (shrink)

The paper focuses on the use of phenomenological psychiatry in researching the life-world of psychiatric patients. Although the subjective experiences of patients can be fundamental for understanding the inner life crisis and revealing a meaning that could make these experiences understandable, they are often undervalued in clinical psychiatry for their not being considered useful for diagnosis.The personal attitude of people affected by schizophrenia is often considered as simply a manifestation of psychosis, the epiphenomena of the mental illness. However, as we (...) can see in the work of Minkowski and Binswanger, the behaviour of patients is the result of an inner struggle with the external world. Patients try to make coherent constructions compatible with their criteria of sense and meaning. These attempts often lead to spurning actions based on “common sense,” to isolation from society, and to avoiding the influence of external reality.Phenomenological method applied to psychiatry allows concentrating attention on subjectivity by investigating the role of values and emotions in the mental illnesses. The explanations made by patients could be seen as a peculiar way of defining oneself, one’s own “being in the world.” Inquiry into patients’ narratives could open valuable views on the concepts surrounding the ideas of Being and life. (shrink)

This paper critically examines Sartre's argument for the meaninglessness of life from our foundationless freedom. According to Sartre, our freedom to choose our values is completely undetermined. Hence, we cannot rely on anything when choosing and cannot justify our choices. Thus, our freedom is the foundation of our world without itself having any foundation, and this renders our lives absurd. Sartre's argument presupposes, then, that although we can freely choose all our values we have a meta-value that we cannot (...) choose: that values are acceptable only if they are justified by some independent factor rather than by one's free choice. I argue that we need not accept this presupposition: subjectivists may well choose to be 'proud subjectivists' who are pleased with, rather than ashamed by, their subjectivism. Indeed, many subjectivists, including those considering the meaning of life - for example, Harry Frankfurt and Brooke Alan Trisel - adopt this position. (shrink)

In the discussions related to the question of the meaning of life, I hinted that the idea of death would play a crucial role in talk about the potential meaninglessness of life. In this chapter, I elaborate on this premise. First, I provide an overview of what I take to be a general understanding of the concept of death, which considers it as the decline and decay of a biological entity to the point where regeneration is impossible, and an (...) irreversible decay is inevitable. I also consider African notions of death, which view death as a transition event or process of disembodiment in which the human spirit continues to live on in some way. Following this, I then show the implausibility of the idea of disembodiment, arguing that there is nothing more to the human person than her physical components. In this way, I conclude that the finality of death implies nothingness and a deep plunge into meaninglessness. Furthermore, I note that even if disembodiment were a possibility the tedium of immortality still stands to render our lives meaningless. (shrink)

Roman Ingarden offered a strong criticism of the verifiability principle in his talk delivered at the 8th International Congress in Prague in 1934. Ingarden argued that this principle either violates itself or smuggles a hidden sense. In this paper I show that Ingarden-like arguments about smuggled (but this pejorative qualification is skipped) meaning apply not only to the criteria of sense, but also to other semantic assertions within language-hierarchies in Tarski’s sense.

An influential critique of ontology, traditionally linked to Rudolf Carnap, logical empiricism, and verificationism, has it that ontological questions and statements are meaningless. In recent years, Amie Thomasson has revived this Carnapian critique, albeit in a non-verificationist version. This chapter argues that the meaningfulness of ontological statements can be vindicated by appealing to considerations compatible with Thomasson’s Carnapian approach. Two possible avenues are explored. The first is that of specifying the assertibility conditions of ontological statements like ‘There are Fs’, by (...) providing an adequate rule of use. The second is that of spelling out the truth-conditions of the same ontological statements by means of a T-schema where the right-hand side is a sentence formulated in a language specifically introduced for doing ontology—what several authors call ‘Ontologese’. It is proposed that Ontologese be introduced as a bona-fide Carnapian framework, and this option is defended against a number of objections. (shrink)

The shift from a moral worldview to a post-moral worldview implies the development of anti-totalizing concern. The inexistence of Truth-itself relativizes the quest for happiness. Existential despair is then a possibility-to-be, particularly when we acknowledge the meaninglessness of all things, beings, events, and phenomena. The borders between Good and Evil are ever-changing. Organizational members who endorse a post-moral worldview could then justify their metaphysical revolt against meaninglessness (Albert Camus). Their self-transcendence processes could even be paradoxical since transcending oneself (...) is strongly criticizing the all-encompassing meaninglessness. Organizational members are willing to participate in organizational activities and processes of exchanging truth-claims. Nonetheless, they always question all (organizationally driven) meanings, values, and beliefs. Their existential anxiety and despair represent an unsurpassable limit-situation of their own existence. Organizational members strongly oppose all forms of totalization since every totalization strengthens the existence of Truth-itself. Their ontic positioning is centered on the meaninglessness of their own existence. They know they live in a world of (unsurpassable) uncertainties, doubts, and contradictions since everything is meaningless. (shrink)

After a thorough engagement with reality from the African purview. After a careful analysis of how the African past is distorted through history and logic which in turn affects the African’s articulation of reality. A paradox which this book considers before it comes to a close in this chapter is whether life is meaningful at all. In the first place, I contend that the question of life’s meaningfulness or meaninglessness cannot be a conclusive subject. As humans, not only do (...) we possess fallible faculties but are also primordially defect to arrive at a univocal measure for life’s meaning. After considering various African perspectives concerning the meaning of life, I settle for neutral nihilismneutral nihilism as I contend that it is one thing to be indifferent about the realization that ultimately life has no meaning (nihilism) from the human perspective compare to taking an indifferent position about life itself. I tender that the former is a better disposition. (shrink)

In the previous chapters, I alluded to the fact that although death does not allow us to talk about the meaning of life, a longer life or an eternal life would equally not grant us the meaningfulness we desire. In the case of a longer life, death still plays the role of establishing nothingness and in the case of an eternal life (so far, an impossible reality), issues bordering around boredom, the higher chance of susceptibility to constant harm and the (...) eventual redundancy of our values and sources of meaning (due to the infinite nature of our now eternal lives), generally make personal immortality unattractive. These conclusions leave me inclined to consider the view that life is ultimately meaningless and as such deny a meaning of life considered as a whole. From the foregoing, I shall in this chapter examine some responses to meaninglessness and why they fail. I shall also consider Ada Agada’s consolationism—the idea that the moments of joy in our lives should stand as a consolation for us in the face of our futile and tragic existence—as a plausible but inadequate way of dealing with the tragedy of existence. Thus, setting the stage for my eventual proposal of indifference as the proper mode/mood for living with meaninglessness. (shrink)

Although it now seems clear that no verificationalist [[sic]] account of the necessary and sufficient conditions for meaningful discourse is adequate, many philosophers still hope that some general criterion will be formulated. This book is an attempt to supply such a theory. It opens with a discussion of the various views of meaninglessness that have been proposed during this century. Taking operationalism, verificationalism, [[sic]] and the category mistake theory in turn, Erwin provides an analysis of their shortcomings. In addition (...) to the now stock criticisms of the verification theory, an argument is set out to the effect that no workable verificationalist [[sic]] position can theoretically be developed. Erwin also casts doubt on the view of meaninglessness as the lack of a truth value, and attacks Strawson's famous theory of reference failure and truth value gaps. The author's position emerges as equating meaninglessness with "a priori falseness." This would, of course, make all self contradictions meaningless, and the denial of any meaningless statement true. Both of these consequences, as well as the criterion from which they spring, are bound to be controversial. Perhaps the chief virtue of this book is that it succinctly presents all the opposing positions on the subject and gives a detailed analysis of each. Hence, even if Erwin's thesis is incorrect, his book is still worthwhile.--R. P. M. (shrink)

In this paper, we offer a simple argument for the conclusion that the outputs of large language models (LLMs), such as OpenAI’s ChatGPT and Google’s Gemini, are meaningless. Our argument is based on two key premises: (a) that certain kinds of intentions are needed in order for LLMs’ outputs to have literal meanings, and (b) that LLMs cannot plausibly have the right kinds of intentions. We defend this argument from various types of responses, for example, the semantic externalist argument that (...) deference can be assumed to take the place of intentions and the semantic internalist argument that meanings can be defined purely in terms of intrinsic relations between concepts, such as conceptual roles. We conclude the paper by discussing why, even if our argument is sound, the outputs of LLMs nevertheless seem meaningful and can be used to acquire true beliefs and even knowledge. (shrink)

The chapter discusses a particularly popular approach to category mistakes: the meaninglessness view, according to which category mistakes are infelicitous because they are meaningless. A range of arguments are presented against the view. One central argument concerns principles of compositionality, and it is argued that while adopting a certain version of type-theoretic semantics provides the most promising avenue for defenders of the view to handle compositionality, this approach does not succeed in supporting the view. Other arguments raised against the (...) view concern synonymy facts; embeddings of category mistakes in propositional attitude ascriptions; and uses of category mistakes in metaphors. Finally, some positive motivations in favour of the view are presented but dismissed, and the meaninglessness view as a whole is rejected. (shrink)

This chapter is the second of two chapters concerned with whether life is meaningless. In this chapter, it is argued that life has no meaning _sub specie aeternitatis_ (that is, no purpose or point from a cosmic perspective). Nihilism about cosmic meaning is the bad news. Some people deny that life lacks cosmic meaning while others argue that it does not matter that life lacks such meaning. The chapter responds to such arguments, some of which are theistic and some of (...) which are secular. For example, it is argued that cosmic meaning is not to be found in God’s or nature’s purposes, or in the possibility that life on earth is the only life there is. (shrink)