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Tartaglia, JPF (2016) Transculturalism and the Meaning of Life. Humanities, 5 (2).

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Abstract

I begin by introducing the standoff between the transculturalist aim of moving beyond cultural inheritances, and the worry that this project is itself a product of cultural inheritances. I argue that this is rooted in concerns about the meaning of life, and in particular, the prospect of nihilism. I then distinguish two diametrically opposed humanistic responses to nihilism, post-Nietzschean rejections of objective truth, and the moral objectivism favoured by some analytic philosophers, claiming that both attempt, in different ways, to break down the distinction between description and evaluation. I argue that the evaluative sense of a “meaningful life” favoured by moral objectivists cannot track objective meaningfulness in human lives, and that there are manifest dangers to treating social meaning judgements as a secular substitute for the meaning of life. I then conclude that the problems of the post-Nietzscheans and moral objectivists can be avoided, and the transculturalist standoff alleviated, if we recognise that nihilism is descriptive, and maintain a principled distinction between description and evaluation

Item Type:	Article
Uncontrolled Keywords:	transculturalism, meaning of life, meaning in life, humanism, description and evaluation, moral objectivism, Nietzsche
Subjects:	B Philosophy. Psychology. Religion > B Philosophy (General)
Divisions:	Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences > School of Politics, Philosophy, International Relations and Environment
Related URLs:	Author
Depositing User:	Symplectic
Date Deposited:	26 Apr 2016 08:35
Last Modified:	15 Apr 2019 08:41
URI:	http://eprints.keele.ac.uk/id/eprint/1670

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