The meaning of life and death
Subtitle: ten classic thinkers on the ultimate question
By: Michael Hauskeller
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
Published: 2019
Place of publication: London
Language: eng
Number of pages: 236
ISBN-13: 9781350073678; 9781350073654
Subjects: Death; Life; Meaning (Philosophy); Philosophy
Description: "What is the point of living? If we are all going to die anyway, if nothing will remain of whatever we achieve in this life, why should we bother trying to achieve anything in the first place? Can we be mortal and still live a meaningful life? Questions such as these have been asked for a long time, but nobody has found a conclusive answer yet. The connection between death and meaning, however, has taken centre stage in the philosophical and literary work of some of the world's greatest writers: Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Leo Tolstoy, Soren Kierkegaard, Arthur Schopenhauer, Herman Melville, Friedrich Nietzsche, William James, Ludwig Wittgenstein, Marcel Proust, and Albert Camus. This book explores their ideas, weaving a rich tapestry of concepts, voices and images, helping the reader to understand the concerns at the heart of those writers' work and uncovering common themes and stark contrasts in their understanding of what kind of world we live in and what really matters in life."--Bloomsbury Publishing.
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Table of contents: title: Prelude; title: Chapter 1: Arthur Schopenhauer and the Worst of All Possible Worlds; title: Chapter 2: Søren Kierkegaard and the Despair of Not Being Oneself; title: Chapter 3: Herman Melville and the Interlinked Terrors and Wonders of God; title: Chapter 4: Fyodor Dostoyevsky and the Hell of No Longer Being Able to Love; title: Chapter 5: Leo Tolstoy and the Inevitable End of Everything; title: Chapter 6: Friedrich Nietzsche and the Joy of Living Dangerously; title: Chapter 7: William James and the Dramatic Richness of the Concrete World; title: Chapter 8: Marcel Proust and the Only Life That Is Really Lived; title: Chapter 9: Ludwig Wittgenstein and our Hopeless Battle against the Boundaries of Language; title: Chapter 10: Albert Camus and the Benign Indifference of the World; title: Postlude; title: Sources.