Peter Wessel Zapffe

The present text deals with the question of the meaning of life in the existentialist theory of the Norwegian philosopher Peter Wessel Zapffe . In his book On the Tragic (1941), Zapffe sketched a theory of the human condition where the meaning of life plays a decisive role together with the human need for justice. This paper aims to reconstruct the central elements of Zapffe's analysis and to discuss them critically by focusing on his claim that human beings need a fundamental meaning of life as a whole that transcends meaning in life. I pay particular attention to Zapffe's claim that life is meaningless, since the meaning of life is fundamentally lacking. I conclude that Zapffe's analysis is problematic for reasons both internal and external to his theory.

The human predicament is a precarious one, since man’s consciousness brings about a variety of existential problems. This essay explores some of these problems and the ways man addresses them according to Peter Wessel Zapffe and Søren Kierkegaard. In his essay The Last Messiah, Zapffe identified four protective mechanisms that man employs in order to limit his consciousness, allowing him to live with a sense of equanimity. These cannot provide anything close to ultimate fulfillment, however, thus we turn to Kierkegaard’s The Sickness Unto Death to elucidate why they cannot redeem man and instead force him into despair, and to discover how man is able to eradicate this despair caused by his consciousness. In this book, Kierkegaard – writing under the pseudonym Anti-Climacus – proposes increasing one’s self-awareness in order to arrive at a particular, individual kind of Christian faith by courageously accepting the absurd offer God made to us embodied in Christ. Only by following this path, one characterized by a constant heightening of despair, is man genuinely able to escape despair.

Outlining the influence of both Berkeley's sensationalism and Uexküll's biosemiotics on Zapffe's biosophy, I will examine why the latter can be defined as an experiential philosophy, which contributes to avoiding the pitfalls of biological determinism as well as the ones of ungrounded metaphysical spirituality. Furthermore, adopting biosophical method could benefit revealing why biological constitution is a necessary but not sufficient condition for clarifying why humans are such beings that require the embodiment of meaning with their lives. In this context, one of the main objectives of the paper is to analyze why we should examine biosophical and biological methods as ontological synonyms rather than synonyms or two alternatives, which are introduced on the principle 'either-or'. Justifying such an approach will be an object of special investigation for the purposes of overcoming both moral naturalism and moral relativism.

The main objective of this extended chapter is to analyze the reasons behind the development of the concept of biosophy, as displayed by the Norwegian philosopher Peter Wessel Zapffe. Providing a genealogical reconstruction of biosophy as a method, we aim at examining some of the following open-ended questions in Zapffe’s works. What are the reasons for defining biosophical and biological methods as mutually inclusive methods, which, however, are irreducible to each other, as Zapffe suggests, so that to avoid the philosophical implications of biosophy pointing towards biological determinism? What kind of arguments can we find for outlining the unique aspects of biosophy as a philosophical theory against the background of the gradually developing preference to biosophical method over biosophy, as understood by Zapffe? What is the interdisciplinary potential of biosophical theory which contributes to revealing the role of biosophy as a complex philosophical conception borrowing some methods from the fields of biosemiotics, ethology, biology, psychology and existential philosophy?

By calling for cooperation in the midst of actual social cooperation, which has manifested itself so vividly during the current pandemic, intellectuals retroactively take credit for it. By filling with themselves the imaginary lack and by appropriating social cooperation, they also create the specific compensatory type of cooperation. Such parasitizing on actual cooperation establishes its own inter-academic cooperation, the one that we articulate during the bonding conferences and in our papers written for each other.

The aim of this monograph is to reveal the complex development of 20th-century Norwegian environmental philosophies from a comparative perspective by outlining not only the role of the similar philosophical premises they derive from, but also how the differences in the chosen strategies affected the changes in Norwegian environmental politics. That is why one of my main objectives is to analyze the origin and the elaboration of some concepts and ideas which contribute to clarifying the multi-sidedness of the topic by going beyond the well-known theory of the founder of deep ecology, namely, that of the Norwegian philosopher, mountaineer and environmental activist, Arne Næss.

The so-called asymmetrical argument demonstrates a significant disproportion between a value of goodness and evil for existing people, compared to the absence of these phenomena in case of those, who have never existed. The philosopher, who first fully formulated this argument to justify his antinatalistic position, was David Benatar. In this paper I examine the extent to which the Benatar´s asymmetrical argument has been confirmed by its historically older versions. Primarily I examine the dependence of agreement between Benatar´s and Hans Jonas argumentation on the interpretation of Jonas´philosophy. Finally I investigate whether the asymmetry between good and evil is actually reflected in human thinking.

Outlining the influence of both Berkeley’s sensationalism and Uexküll’s biosemiotics on Zapffe’s biosophy, I will examine why the latter can be defined as an experiential philosophy, which contributes to avoiding the pitfalls of biological determinism as well as the ones of ungrounded metaphysical spirituality. Furthermore, adopting biosophical method could benefit revealing why biological constitution is a necessary but not sufficient condition for clarifying why humans are such beings that require the embodiment of meaning with their lives. In this context, one of the main objectives of the paper is to analyze why we should examine biosophical and biological methods as ontological synonyms rather than synonyms or two alternatives, which are introduced on the principle ‘either-or’. Justifying such an approach will be an object of special investigation for the purposes of overcoming both moral naturalism and moral relativism.