The question 'What is the meaning of life?' is one of the most fascinating, oldest and most difficult questions human beings have ever posed themselves. In an increasingly secularized culture, it remains a question to which we are ineluctably and powerfully drawn.
Drawing skillfully on a wealth of thinkers, writers and scientists from Augustine, Descartes, Freud and Camus, to Spinoza, Pascal, Darwin, and Wittgenstein, On the Meaning of Life breathes new vitality into one of the very biggest questions.
Preface Chapter 1 The Question
The question that won't go away
Science and Meaning
Something rather than nothing
A Religious question?
Meaning after God
Man the Measure of All things?
Variety, MEaning and Evaluation
What Meaningfulness implies
Meaning and Morality
Humanity and Openess
Chapter 2 The Barrier to Meaning
The Void
The Challenge of Modernity
The Shadow of Darwin
Science, Religion and Meaning
Evolution and 'Blind' Forces
The 'Nastiness' of the Evolutionary Mechanism
Matter and Surplus Suffering
The Character of the Cosmos
Chapter 3 Meaning, Vulnerability and Hope
Morality and Achievement
Futility and Fragility
Religion and the Buoyancy of the Good
Vulnerability and Finitude
Spirituality and Inner Change
Doctrine and Praxis
From Praxis to FAith
Coda: Intimations of Meaning
