sandy@plx.UUCP (sandy) (02/03/84)
Paul Dubuc claims that philosophers consider the meaning of life an important issue. His exact words to E. Flinn: "You are at odds with philosophers when you suggest that we should not be concerned with the meaning of life". This gave me a bit of a chuckle. I finished a Ph. D. in philosophy in 1979, and NEVER in my graduate training did I ever hear "the meaning of life" even mentioned as a serious philosophical problem. It's one of those old-time metaphysical issues, like the existence of God, or freedom of the will, or immortality of the soul, that were shown as early as Kant (in the "Antinomies of Pure Reason" part of the "Critique of Pure Reason") to be unsolvable by logic or scientific method. This is NOT to say that God does not exist, or that the soul is not immortal, or that life has no meaning, etc. -- just that we can't prove these things. In the 20th century, Ayer, Hempel, and other analytic philosophers went on to claim that statements like "God exists" or "God doesn't exist" were meaningless (note: both statements equally meaningless), because they were not liable to test by any CONCEIVABLE experiment. They said it was impossible to even IMAGINE a test that would conclusively show one side or the other, in an intersubjectively verifiable way. I believe this is still the most popular view among philosophers. Thus when Paul asks E. Flinn whether s/he believes the meaning of life cannot be known OR whether s/he believes life has no meaning, he is offering a false dilemma. These aren't the only alternatives. You can also just not understand what would count as an answer. For myself, I tend to agree with the Eastern (and Wittgensteinian) view that "those who know do not speak, those who speak do not know". Maybe that's why I don't teach philosophy any more ... -- Sandy LaFave P. S. Incidentally, mentioning the meaning of life to a group of contemporary philosophers is, as the author of "The Mind-Body Problem" (a novel about philosophers) points out, likely to cause child-like hilarity, as if you told a bathroom joke.