Philosophers tend to treat meaningfulness as a type of value worth seeking and promoting, on a par with well-being and moral value. In this paper I argue that finding something in one's life meaningful does not require attributing to it any substantive positive value, but rather it can be rooted in an attachment to one's narrative identity or to one's place in a broader story about the world. This proposal explains how we can find meaning in past experiences of adversity, hardship, or loss without finding any silver linings in such experiences or having reason to seek them again the future.
Emotions are central to our engagements with fictional narratives and partly ground our evaluations of literary works. Nevertheless, the idea of reacting emotionally to a work of fiction raises problems that philosophers are still struggling to deal with. In this paper, we will focus on a subset of these problems, which concerns the psychological function of emotions in the context of reading fiction. The standard approach to this question assumes an internalist and individualist perspective, focusing on individual internal states. However, we argue that our emotional responses to fiction are deeply social, embedded in social practices and serving important social functions that are often neglected in the literature, which constrain and partly determine the emotionality of the reading experience. The goal of this paper, therefore, is to supplement the internalist perspective by exploring the social dimension of emotions in fiction. Our main argument is that the emotions we feel when reading literary works look both inward and outward. They help our embodied imaginative recreations of narrative worlds, but they also engage authors of fictional works and other readers who partake in this practice with us, which calls for a more social and externalist approach to understanding emotions in fiction.
Philosophical debates on assertion norms advance different rules for when assertions count as proper or warranted. In this paper, I show that in order to resolve these debates, engagement with speech act theory can be fruitful. In particular, a speech act may be infelicitous or 'unhappy' for different and mutually independent reasons. Specifically, an assertion may be defective either for reasons concerning the epistemic position of the speaker, or for reasons concerning the state of the world. The speaker may be held responsible for the former but not for the latter. The same distinction also applies to other speech acts. If all participants in the debate were to acknowledge that an assertion may be improper for different reasons, the discussion would lose its rationale.
In Wittgenstein's early remarks on value and the mystical, we find a particular philosophical problem that I shall call 'Wittgenstein's Koan'. The problem emerges because Wittgenstein holds three prima facie incompatible claims: the totality of what exists is the totality of facts, that is, the world; absolute value cannot be part of the world; yet there are experiences, such as the experience of wonder at the existence of the world, that somehow seem to have absolute value. In this paper I shall argue that this problem should be treated like a Zen's koan, that is, a paradox that can't be solved through canonical discursive moves but requires a non-discursive experiential breakthrough, what is called 'kensho' in Zen Buddhism. To support this contention, I shall argue that canonical discursive solutions are exegetically or theoretically implausible or both and I shall describe the key experiential breakthrough which Wittgenstein lived and made him feel that there is indeed a koan to be explored and solved. In this way, the paper intends to contribute to the ever-growing interest in the dialogue between Wittgenstein's philosophy and Zen Buddhism.
For some time, philosophical analyses of life's meaning have almost universally treated it as constituted by value of a certain sort. However, this has recently been challenged by philosophers who instead see life's meaning as constituted by something like sense or intelligibility. Pushing back against the challenge posed by this 'Intelligibility View', it has been argued that it fails to capture everything we mean when we talk of meaningful lives (Metz 2019), and that the established 'Value View' is ultimately the correct approach (Landau 2021). Focusing on the specific theory presented in Thomas (2019), this paper attempts to defend the Intelligibility View from some of the objections and counter-examples given against it, while also providing counter-examples to the Value View in return. In addition, it evaluates and rejects the option of retaining both views, with each being correct in different contexts, and the option of subsuming one view into the other. It concludes that the Intelligibility View is the neatest, most intuitive, and most theoretically plausible approach to life's meaning currently in the literature.
