The Meaning of Life

The phrase the meaning of life for many seems a quaint notion fit for satirical mauling by Monty Python or Douglas Adams But in this spirited Very Short Introduction, famed critic Terry Eagleton takes a serious if often amusing look at the question and offers his own surprising answer Eagleton first examines how centuries of thinkers and writers from Marx and Schopenhauer to Shakespeare, Sartre, and Beckett have responded to the ultimate question of meaning He suggests, however, that it is only in modern times that the question has become problematic But instead of tackling it head on, many of us cope with the feelings of meaninglessness in our lives by filling them with everything from football to sex, Kabbala, Scientology, New Age softheadedness, or fundamentalism On the other hand, Eagleton notes, many educated people believe that life is an evolutionary accident that has no intrinsic meaning If our lives have meaning, it is something with which we manage to invest them, not something with which they come ready made Eagleton probes this view of meaning as a kind of private enterprise, and concludes that it fails to holds up He argues instead that the meaning of life is not a solution to a problem, but a matter of living in a certain way It is not metaphysical but ethical It is not something separate from life, but what makes it worth living that is, a certain quality, depth, abundance and intensity of life Here then is a brilliant discussion of the problem of meaning by a leading thinker, who writes with a light and often irreverent touch, but with a very serious end in mind About the Series Combining authority with wit, accessibility, and style, Very Short Introductions offer an introduction to some of life s most interesting topics Written by experts for the newcomer, they demonstrate the finest contemporary thinking about the central problems and issues in hundreds of key topics, from philosophy to Freud, quantum theory to Islam. Read The Meaning of Life – kino-fada.fr The Meaning of Life A Very Short Introductions Very Short Introductions 186 , Terry EagletonWe have all wondered about the meaning of life But is there an answer And do we even really know what we re asking Terry Eagleton takes a stimulating and quirky look at this most compelling of questions at the answers explored in philosophy and literature at the crisis of meaning in modern times and suggests his own solution to how we might rediscover meaning in our lives The Meaning of Life A...This book is quite fun as long as you don t take it too seriously, and, let s face it, it is almost impossible to take seriously a book called the meaning of life, a very short introduction There is something paradoxical about the meaning of life being an introduction surely we are after conclusions This has a nice pace and enough jokes to keep you smiling between ideas My favourite joke in the whole thing one I d never heard before and feel very surprised that I never thought of it This book is quite fun as long as you don t take it too seriously, and, let s ...This starts off reasonably well the first dozen or so pages demonstrate a gratifying precision, setting up the prospect of a brief but rigorous analysis And then crash It all falls apart What ruined it for me Several things Literary tangents that went on far too long Grating political biases that had no place here and became all too frequent he s not keen on liberals and yes, his attack is always on liberals rather than...How can an English professor and literary critic write a philosophical brief on the meaning of life Well, Terry Eagleton did, and did it well He takes us through the end of Victorian certainty and shows how Hardy and Conrad raised questions with a sense of urgency that Jane Austin never had In the early decades of the 20th Century, T.S Eliot and Camus and Sartre brought challenges to all our values, beliefs and institutions.Most in the West that is outside of the US have now accepted the How can an English profes...Terry Eagleton , a long time literary critic of Marxist training Marxist Literary Criticsm, Literary Theory, Illusions of Post Moderism and Catholic church moral rigor and one of the best explicators of the dually condensed and convoluted intersections of literature, philosophy and political action, has give us all a small, witty, tersely choice gift with his new book,correctly an essay, called The Meaning of Life Eagleton s intent, despite what one might assume, isn t to cast a Terry Eagleton , a long time literary critic of Marxist training Marxist Literary Criticsm, Literary Theory, Illusions of Post Moderism and Catholic church moral rigor and one of the best explicators of the dually condensed and convoluted intersections of literature, philosophy and political action, has give us all a small, witty, tersely choice gift with his new book,correctly an essay, called The Meaning of Life Eagleton s intent, despite what one might assume, isn t to cast a disparaging glare at what has to be simultaneously the most over asked and least answerable question issued ...For the author as a long time literary critic of Marxist training with Wittgensteinian tendencies meaning is a matter of language, not of things So there is no real question of what life means, as as there is no real question , then there is no real answer And also due postmodern way of looking as a literary critic, life is not meaningful, but neither is it meaningless He sums up his conclusion as The meaning of life is less a proposition than a practice It is not an esoteric truth, but a For the author as a long time literary critic of Marxist training with Wittgensteinian tendencies meaning is a matter of language, not of things So there is no real question of what life means, as as t...If you don t read this book, at least read the Goodreads description of it, which is quite accurate And which also praises the Oxford Very Short Introduction series, of which this is the second I ve read Eagleton spends a large section of the book discussing the meaning of meaning he s a professor of literary theory, so that s his bread and butter he then goes on to discuss the possible meanings of life He thus fulfills the warning of his opening sentence P...Excellent tour through a number of thinkers on this ultimate question including a side trip into an Anglo American philosophical discussion on the meaning of words like meaning Schopenhauer, Wittgenstein, Samuel Beckett and Shakespeare figure prominently, but ultimately T.E stumps a little bit for a combination of practical Aristotelian eudaimonia virtue flourishing and Christian agape or, in less spiritual guise, reciprocity as a possible way forward Interestingly for T.E., Marx is Excellent tour through a number of thinkers on this ultimate question including a side trip into an Anglo American philosophical discussion on the meaning of words like meaning Schopenhauer, Wittgenstein, Samuel Beckett and Shakespeare figure prominently, but ultimately T.E stumps a little bit for a combination of practical Aristotelian eudaimonia virtue flourishing and Christian agap...The Meaning Of Life In A Very Short IntroductionOf the many subjects covered in the Oxford University Press Very Short Introductions series, few can be as diffuse and difficult to understand as The Meaning of Life as explored in this 2008 volume by Terry Eagleton Many readers believe that philosophers explore and address the question of the meaning of life and are frustrated when the philosophers appear to back away The question persists in study, among many people whether religious or The Meaning Of Life In A Very Short IntroductionOf the many subjects covered in the Oxford University Press Very Short Introductions series, few can be as diffuse and difficult to understand as The Meaning of Life as explored in this 2008 volume by Terry Eagleton Many readers believe that philosophers explore and address the question of the meaning of life and are frustrated when the philosophers appear to back away The question persists in study, among many people whether religious or non religious, and in popular culture It is a subject for serious people and for cranks and charlatans Although his short book shows wide philosophical reading, Eagleton is not a professional philosopher but rather the John Edward Taylor Professor of English at...Look at the discrepancy The book starts out simple and nice but after a couple of paragraphs we are going straight into Wittgenstein and his philosophical concepts and trying to understand a bunch of them and several pages later we are back to talking about the meaning of life Is that a philosophical treatise incognito Why not...

• English
• 26 March 2018
Terry Eagleton
• Hardcover
• 187 pages
• 0199210705
• Terry Eagleton
• The Meaning of Life