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"Meaning (Philosophy)"
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Education's end
The question of what living is for--of what one should care about and why--is the most important question a person can ask. Yet under the influence of the modern research ideal, our colleges and universities have expelled this question from their classrooms, judging it unfit for organized study. In this eloquent and carefully considered book, Tony Kronman explores why this has happened and calls for the restoration of life's most important question to an honored place in higher education. The author contrasts an earlier era in American education, when the question of the meaning of life was at the center of instruction, with our own times, when this question has been largely abandoned by college and university teachers. In particular, teachers of the humanities, who once felt a special responsibility to guide their students in exploring the question of what living is for, have lost confidence in their authority to do so. And they have lost sight of the question itself in the blinding fog of political correctness that has dominated their disciplines for the past forty years. Yet Kronman sees a readiness for change--a longing among teachers as well as students to engage questions of ultimate meaning. He urges a revival of the humanities' lost tradition of studying the meaning of life through the careful but critical reading of great works of literary and philosophical imagination. And he offers here the charter document of that revival.
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What is meaning?
The tradition descending from Frege and Russell has typically treated theories of meaning either as theories of meanings (propositions expressed), or as theories of truth conditions. However, propositions of the classical sort don't exist, and truth conditions can't provide all the information required by a theory of meaning. In this book, one of the world's leading philosophers of language offers a way out of this dilemma.
Traditionally conceived, propositions are denizens of a \"third realm\" beyond mind and matter, \"grasped\" by mysterious Platonic intuition. As conceived here, they are cognitive-event types in which agents predicate properties and relations of things--in using language, in perception, and in nonlinguistic thought. Because of this, one's acquaintance with, and knowledge of, propositions is acquaintance with, and knowledge of, events of one's cognitive life. This view also solves the problem of \"the unity of the proposition\" by explaining how propositions can be genuinely representational, and therefore bearers of truth. The problem, in the traditional conception, is that sentences, utterances, and mental states are representational because of the relations they bear to inherently representational Platonic complexes of universals and particulars. Since we have no way of understanding how such structures can be representational, independent of interpretations placed on them by agents, the problem is unsolvable when so conceived. However, when propositions are taken to be cognitive-event types, the order of explanation is reversed and a natural solution emerges. Propositions are representational because they are constitutively related to inherently representational cognitive acts.
Strikingly original,What Is Meaning?is a major advance.
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The limits of meaning
Too often, anthropological accounts of ritual leave readers with the impression that everything goes smoothly, that rituals are \"meaningful events.\" But what happens when rituals fail, or when they seem \"meaningless\"? Drawing on research in the anthropology of Christianity from around the globe, the authors in this volume suggest that in order to analyze meaning productively, we need to consider its limits. This collection is a welcome new addition to the anthropology of religion, offering fresh debates on a classic topic and drawing attention to meaning in a way that other volumes have for key terms like \"culture\" and \"fieldwork.
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On the Meaning of Life
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.
Preface Chapter 1 The Question The question that won't go away Science and Meaning Something rather than nothing A Religious question? Meaning after God Man the Measure of All things? Variety, MEaning and Evaluation What Meaningfulness implies Meaning and Morality Humanity and Openess Chapter 2 The Barrier to Meaning The Void The Challenge of Modernity The Shadow of Darwin Science, Religion and Meaning Evolution and 'Blind' Forces The 'Nastiness' of the Evolutionary Mechanism Matter and Surplus Suffering The Character of the Cosmos Chapter 3 Meaning, Vulnerability and Hope Morality and Achievement Futility and Fragility Religion and the Buoyancy of the Good Vulnerability and Finitude Spirituality and Inner Change Doctrine and Praxis From Praxis to FAith Coda: Intimations of Meaning
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Normativity, Meaning and Philosophy
This is a collection of essays on Wittgenstein originally published between 1996 and 2019, with a new introduction. The essays defend and develop a central Wittgensteinian idea: 'grammatical rules' for the use of expressions hold the key to understanding linguistic meaning, as well as its connections to necessary propositions, conceptual thought, and the nature of philosophy.
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