Category Archives: philosophy

Vipassana – vaguely sensational.

Two weeks before Christmas I went on a 10 day silent retreat on a former farm in Hereford. Or, as one friend describes it, Meditation Boot Camp. It certainly was tough but now I’ve had a few weeks to recover … Continue reading

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The best essay on the meaning of life I’ve ever read.

As you may know I once asked every philosopher in the UK about the meaning of life. It was a slightly depressing experience. Only 22 out of a possible?644 replied . Those replies were great. Being philosophers they didn’t actually … Continue reading

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The Many Humanist Meanings of Life, Narrated by Stephen Fry

Regular readers of this blog  (hello mother!) will know that I’ve had a long running obsession with answers to the meaning of life. Asking professional philosophers wasn’t terribly successful. My novel doesn’t really have the answers either. But Stephen Fry does! Lots … Continue reading

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A physicist’s take on the meaning of life

Sean Carroll is a theoretical physicist and a science communicator. He’s a cosmologist with a particular interest in understanding what time is. He is also a vocal atheist who spends a fair bit of his own time arguing with philosophers … Continue reading

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Boomhauer Explains The Meaning Of Life in 43 seconds

Boomhauer Explains The Meaning Of Life – YouTube.

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The Meaning of Life (in Under 300 Words)

It turns out some psychologists (Baumeister and Vohs, 2002) have found the meaning of life. Psychologists are much more pragmatic than philosophers. Rather than working out the meaning of life from first principles or anything daft like that they just went … Continue reading

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Sterile Motherfather Mary and Intergalactic Jesus

http://www.flickr.com/49503002139@N01/83937429/ created on 2006-01-08 13:46:18 Ari MooreCC BY-NC-SA 2.0 Searching through some old emails for reflections on the topic of absurdity..  I found a wonderfully topical article from Dec 2001 edition of the London Review of Books. Jerry Coyne was … Continue reading

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Alan Watts on the meaning of life

Alan ‘The way of zen’ Watts on life as animated by Matt “South” Stone and Trey “Park” Parker [youtube WGoTmNU_5A0] via Richard Wiseman and Stephen Long’s Blog.

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John Ashbery

My Philosophy of Life Just when I thought there wasn’t room enough for another thought in my head, I had this great idea– call it a philosophy of life, if you will.Briefly, it involved living the way philosophers live, according … Continue reading

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Tim Mawson

St Peter’s College, Oxford 5th Jan 2004 Dear Caspar (if I may), Thank you very much for your letter of the first of October last year. I am sorry to have taken so long in replying to it. Initially, I … Continue reading

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Fiona Macpherson

Dear Mr. Addyman, Thank you very much for your letter asking about the meaning of life, the universe and everything. I cannot provide you will an answer but I hope to show in what way phiolsophy tries to contibute towards … Continue reading

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Nancy Cartwright

By Post: Dear Mr Addyman I’m sorry. I haven’t a clue how to help with your question! Yours Nancy Cartwright

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Wikipedia on the meaning of life

From Wikipedia.org How philosophers have addressed the question Over the millennia, philosophers have had much to say about this question–though philosophers do not fixate on it as much as popular conceptions might lead one to believe. Theories of value–of which … Continue reading

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Mark Sainsbury

From: Mark Sainsbury Date: 18 Oct 2003, 19:48:52 Subject: Meaning Life has no meaning, but individuals can make their lives meaningful by thinking what they would most like to achieve and then trying to achieve that. Self-awareness among ‘cranks and … Continue reading

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‘Orthogonal’

Barnyard animals provide a good example of how not to make a fuss about what it means to live – they just live. Standing in a slaughterhouse queue, a mature sheep, for example, accepts an impending bullet-in-the-brain with perfect metaphysical … Continue reading

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