James Tartaglia j.tartaglia@keele.ac.uk
Transculturalism and the Meaning of Life
Tartaglia
Authors
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
Acceptance Date | Apr 22, 2016 |
---|---|
Publication Date | Apr 26, 2016 |
Publicly Available Date | Mar 29, 2024 |
Journal | Humanities |
Publisher | MDPI |
DOI | https://doi.org/10.3390/h5020025 |
Keywords | transculturalism, meaning of life, meaning in life, humanism, description and evaluation, moral objectivism, Nietzsche |
Publisher URL | https://doi.org/10.3390/h5020025 |
Files
tartaglia_humanities_2016.pdf
(263 Kb)
PDF
Publisher Licence URL
https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/
You might also like
Philosophy and Jena Romanticism
(2023)
Journal Article
Gyekye and Contemporary Idealism
(2023)
Book Chapter
Technology and Rorty's Cultural Politics
(2022)
Book Chapter
The Ontology of Freedom
(2022)
Journal Article
A dialogue on / In performance philosophy
(2021)
Journal Article
Downloadable Citations
About Keele Repository
Administrator e-mail: research.openaccess@keele.ac.uk
This application uses the following open-source libraries:
SheetJS Community Edition
Apache License Version 2.0 (http://www.apache.org/licenses/)
PDF.js
Apache License Version 2.0 (http://www.apache.org/licenses/)
Font Awesome
SIL OFL 1.1 (http://scripts.sil.org/OFL)
MIT License (http://opensource.org/licenses/mit-license.html)
CC BY 3.0 ( http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/)
Powered by Worktribe © 2024
Advanced Search