Brady National Conference on Ethics and Civil Life
February 11, 2025
Here is a link to register for individual events during the two-day conference.
Meaning and the Afterlife
Despite its conventional association with philosophy, the question of life’s meaning is often dismissed as nonsense by contemporary philosophers—or replaced with questions about meaningful lives—and for most earlier philosophers, the question doesn’t arise. In this talk, I’ll use the surprisingly recent origins of “the meaning of life” to explain what it could be. Drawing on a Romantic tradition in which the human future stands in for eschatology, I’ll argue that life could have a secular meaning, one that depends on progress towards justice, and thus depends on us.