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Author Meets Critic: Session 1 · Issue 2, 17 July 2014 · Open Access

Meaning as a Distinct and Fundamental Value: Reply to Kershnar

Affiliations & Notes ⌄
  1. 1Department of Philosophy (B-602), University of Johannesburg, POB 524, Auckland Park, 2006, South Africa
  2. 2Email: tmetz@uj.ac.za
Article Info ⌄
Journal:
Science, Religion and Culture
Published:
17 July 2014
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From the article

  • Here I turn to Kershnar’s other suggestion about why one ought to doubt that there is anything such as meaning in life.
  • Kershnar maintains that the former has more meaning in her life than the latter, which my theory cannot explain.
  • My theory therefore appears unable to account even for the intuition that the peasant woman has some decent share of meaning in her life (setting aside Kershnar’s suggestion that her life is more meaningful than the philosopher-musician’s).
  • On the one hand, Kershnar doubts that meaning in life is a genuine value-theoretic category, while, on the other, he maintains that the fundamentality theory fails to capture what makes a life meaningful.

Selected from the article's own text.

Abstract

I am grateful to Stephen Kershnar for his thoughtful critical notice of my book, Meaning in Life: An Analytic Study (Metz 2013), published elsewhere in the current issue of this journal (2014). He provides a succinct and accurate overview of the book’s central conclusions, and, while being generous about its contribution to the field, also advances some penetrating criticisms of it that merit engagement. Specifically, Kershnar maintains, first, that I did not provide enough evidence that meaning in life is a genuine value-theoretic category as something distinct from and competing with, say, objective well-being, and, second, that, even if there were a value of meaning in life, my fundamentality theory of it would not capture its essence well. In this article, I reply to both of these criticisms, aiming to probe these underexplored issues still more deeply. I also contend that these two criticisms are in tension with each other; in order to contend that my theory of meaning is incorrect, Kershnar must draw on intuitions about the existence of meaning that undercut his suggestion that there is no such thing.

Acknowledgments

For useful correspondence about this article, I am thankful to Gregg Caruso and Stephen Kershnar.

References

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  2. • Kekes, John. 1986. “The Informed Will and the Meaning of Life,” Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 47 (1): 75-90.
  3. • Kershnar, Stephen. 2014. “Thad Metz’s Fundamentality Theory of Meaning in Life: A Critical Review,” Science, Religion & Culture 1 (2): 97-100.
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  6. • Levy, Neil. 2005. “Downshifting and Meaning in Life,” Ratio 18 (2): 176-189.
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  9. • Metz, Thaddeus. 2013. Meaning in Life: An Analytic Study. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
  10. • Metz, Thaddeus. 2014. “Fundamental Conditions of Human Existence as the Ground of Life’s Meaning: Reply to Landau,” Religious Studies doi:10.1017/S0034412514000225.[CrossRef]
  11. • Mintoff, Joseph. 2008. “Transcending Absurdity,” Ratio 21 (1): 64-84.
  12. • Pisciotta, Trevor. 2013. Determinism and Meaningfulness in Lives. Doctoral Dissertation, University of Melbourne.
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  14. • Scanlon, T. M. 1998. What We Owe to Each Other. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press
  15. • Smith, Quentin. 1997. Ethical and Religious Thought in Analytic Philosophy of Language. New Haven: Yale University Press.

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Meaning as a Distinct and Fundamental Value: Reply to Kershnar · ResearchersLinks