Showing papers on "Meaning of life published in 1983"

Empirical Realism and Transcendental Anti-Realism

Abstract: Some years ago, a student of mine penned the following line, to which I hereby give the immortality it surely deserves: 'Descartes held that when he was thinking, his mind could detach itself from his body and think about it completely objectionably'. Perhaps I must bear some responsibility for the less than perfect understanding of Descartes there displayed, but the final slip of the pen which gives the line its memorability invites a Freudian explanation which, assuming that the student was suffering under the old Scottish tradition of compulsory philosophy, attributes to him the unconscious thought 'All this attempt at philosophical objectivity is really objectionable.' Be that as it may, other people who have pursued their philosophical inquiries rather further than my nameless student have recently found reason to question how far objectivity is desirable or even possible. Thomas Nagel diagnoses a whole cluster of philosophical problems (the meaning of life, freewill, personal identity, mind and body, consequentialist versus agent-centered views in ethics) as involving a tension between the claims of subjective and objective points of view,1 and offers the suggestion that 'perhaps the best or truest view is not obtained by transcending oneself as far as possible, perhaps reality should not be identified with objective reality'.2 Bernard Williams, in evaluating the contemporary relevance of Descartes' philosophical project, claims that what is most fundamental to it is something to which we still find ourselves committed, namely the search for 'an absolute conception of the world', that is, 'a conception of reality as it is independently of our thought, and to which all representations of reality can be related'.3 Williams concludes that although physical science is (legitimately) a search for such absolute knowledge, it is not to be had in the social sciences, since there can be no such objectivity about the mental.4

Is the Existence of God Relevant to the Meaning of Life

Abstract: Dieu est necessaire a l'intelligibilite du monde, sans laquelle la vie n'a pas de sens| la preuve est indirecte.

The idea of history in karl marx

Abstract: It has been said that the nineteenth century was the 'century of history', not in the sense that what happened between 1800 and 1900 was more abundant or more momentous than what had happened in previous centuries, but in the sense that studies and investigations concerning the past were undertaken in a more thorough and critical way than previously and that history consequently began to be a problem precisely as history) It could also be said that Karl Marx, the centenary of whose death we celebrate this year, was a central figure, if not the central figure, in that 'century of history', not just in the sense that he pursued studies concerning the past and the present of his time, but also in the sense that he sought to give an answer to the problem of history as such, an answer which we still have to contend with today both politically, in the arena of world history, and existentially, in the arena of one's own personal interpretation of the meaning of life. But we should note at once that the term 'history' presents us immediately with a double meaning: "history as event and history as science, or in terms more simple and more fundamental: happening and story or narrative"? This double meaning of the single term 'history' is to be found in every one of our cultured languages, be it English, French, German, Spanish, Italian, Dutch, Russian, Arabic or Chinese and seems to tie the idea of history intimately to the historical being who is at once the maker and the knower of history. Hegel noted these two sides to the idea of history from the beginning of his own reflection and insisted on the connection between the two as highly significant for the beginning of history. He spoke of both an "objective side as well as a subjective side" in the idea, a historia rerum gestarum as well as the res gestas themselves, or the other way around, of both events and the narration of events or both Gesehehen and Gesehic'hte. "We must hold that the narration of history and historical deeds and events appear at the same time; a common inner principle brings them both together"? What this implies is that history, as a distinct order of reality, at least as Hegel understood it, presupposes a certain kind of consciousness or self-consciousness and that it begins to distinguish itself from nature or from other pre-historical