The Meaning of Life W2019 syllabus
Frederick M . DolanYou know the purpose of the actions you perform in your life. You eat because you’re hungry, sleep because you’re tired, and read the news because you want to know what’s going on in the world. But what’s the purpose of your life as a whole, of life as such? The answer to that question isn’t obvious. In this course, we’ll analyze and evaluate theories of the meaning of life. Although this might seem like a vague or frivolous topic, it’s actually one of the most important. People have wondered about it ever since we began to think seriously, and a great many approaches to the problem have been developed. We’ll encounter a variety of fascinating themes: • What do we mean when we ask “What is the meaning of life?” What sort of question is it, and what sorts of replies count as plausible candidates for an answer? • Is there a meaning of life? Maybe life is pointless, absurd, or evil. • What is the significance of mortality? How should we think about living with death? • What can usefully be said about how best to live or what makes life worth living? • Why is there something rather than nothing? And given that there is something, why is it as it is, given that it might have been otherwise? Why anything? Why this? Most of the authors we’ll read are philosophers (Søren Kierkegaard, Friedrich Nietzsche, Thomas Nagel, and Susan Wolf, among others), and we’ll use the philosophical method to study our topic: breaking the problem down into its elementary parts, carefully defining terms and concepts, and evaluating the validity of arguments and evidence for and against the various claims on offer. In addition to philosophers, however, we’ll also consult a psychologist (Jonathan Haidt), a couple of poets (Wallace Stevens, Philip Larkin), some painters and sculptors (Böcklin, Michelangelo, Rodin), a composer or two (Rachmaninoff and perhaps R. Strauss, Wagner, or Berlioz), and three films (Alain Resnais and Marguerite Duras’s Hiroshima mon amour, Carol Reed’s The Third Man, and Jean-Luc Godard’s Breathless). This course won’t provide you with any easy answers to the question of the meaning of life. But it will enable you to learn your way around the neighborhood of the question and improve your ability to ask and answer it for yourself.
