to the conclusion that the devil exists, because you don't have to run it only on the greatest conceivable being, you can run it on the worst conceivable being. Alan Saunders : Many popular bad arguments tend to occur in the huge area of what we might call the meaning of life. Peter, tell us what the American philosopher Thomas Nagel has to say about the meaning of life. Peter Slezak : Nagel has a wonderful paper called 'The Absurd', where he looks at the concerns we all have, to some extent, and we all at some point in our life, I suppose, think and wonder about the meaning of it all, and the possibility that our existence is absurd in some sense, and he gives a nice account of the reasons that people offer for thinking life is absurd. One he gives, which is very common, when you become aware of the vastness of space and time and our own insignificance, and he says, why does that make it meaningless? Would it help if we were bigger, or if the universe was smaller? And he answers these arguments with a kind of a parody, a kind of a reductio ad absurdum , which helps you to see that there's something wrong with these reasons that people typically give and we all share it in some sense. He gives another example, it's very common and I see it all the time, and I think I'm also subject to some extent