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‘Frail worms of the earth’: philosophical reflections on the meaning of life

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  21 December 2016

CHRISTOPHER HAMILTON
CHRISTOPHER HAMILTON*
Affiliation:
Department of Theology and Religious Studies, King's College London, WC2B 6LE, UK
*
e-mail: [email protected]
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Abstract

Many philosophers in the analytic tradition have recently sought to explore the question of the meaning of life. In the first part of this article I subject two important approaches from this tradition – those of John Cottingham and Susan Wolf – to criticism. I then suggest that Cottingham and Wolf articulate certain assumptions about the meaning of life that are widely shared amongst analytic philosophers. I go on to subject those assumptions to criticism and seek to develop an alternative approach to the question, one that is largely overlooked in the contemporary literature.

Type
Articles
Information
Religious Studies , Volume 54 , Issue 1 , March 2018 , pp. 55 - 71
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Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2016 

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