AGENDA
- Class until 1:30, no office hours
- Setiya follow-up
- Meaning and anti-meaning
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Nyholm and Campbell, "Meaning and Anti-Meaning in Life"
- What activities in life are meaningful?
- What activities in life are meaningless?
Two ways to think about the meaning scale (first paragraph of article):
- Driving to airport...do you agree it's meaningless?
- Sisyphus pushing boulders up the hill...they roll down...he pushes again
- Destroying or undoing a meaningful thing -- killing 1000, destroying a book manuscript
- Others?
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| Left: meaningless things just lack meaning. Like the windiness scale. Right: meaningless things can have negative meaning. Like the pleasure/pain scale. |
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Argument for left scale
- "Meaningless" just means lacking meaning, like windless (is that right?)
- "anti-meaning doesn't seem to be a part of common sense" (p. 13)
Argument for right scale (Nyholm and Campbell)
- important to separate driving to work (low meaning) from Sisyphus and killing 1000 (negative meaning)
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ANTI-MEANING
On both scales, there can be anti-meaning in this sense: there is some sort of pre-existing meaning, and something destroys it.
- Greta Thunberg's meaningful campaign...undone by Trump (feel free to disagree)
- Charlie Kirk's meaningful mission...undone by a shooter (feel free to disagree)
- Amazing, meaningful book manuscript .... undone by putting it through a shredder
- 1000 lives with meaning...undone by a bomb
Two interpretations of anti-meaning
- Defeater model--threats to meaning can reduce meaning, but not into a negative range (+5 --> 0)
- Counterforce model--threats to meaning can reduce meaning into a negative range (+5 ---> -5)
Nyholm and Campbell: we should accept the counterforce model
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- What is positive meaning?
- What is negative meaning?
