Private Fleming at Chancellorsville: The Red Badge of Courage and the Civil War

Portada
University of Missouri Press, 2006 - 359 pàgines
What intelligent person has never pondered the meaning of life? For Yuval Lurie, this is more than a puzzling philosophical question; it is a journey, and in this book he takes readers on a search that ranges from ancient quests for the purpose of life to the ruminations of postmodern thinkers on meaning. He shows that the question about the meaning of life expresses philosophical puzzlement regarding life in general as well as personal concern about one's own life in particular. Lurie traces the emergence of this question as a modern philosophical quandary, riddled with shifts and turns that have arisen over the years in response to it. Tracking the Meaning of Life is written as a critical philosophical investigation stretching over several traditions, such as analytic philosophy, phenomenology, and existentialism. It maps out a journey that explores pivotal responses to this question, drawing especially on the thought of Tolstoy, Wittgenstein, Sartre, and Camus and exploring in depth the insights these thinkers offer regarding their own difficulties concerning the meaning of life. In the book's four sections, Lurie discusses Tolstoy's challenge to experience the religious and transcendental meaning of life by choosing a simple, hardworking existence; Wittgenstein's focus on ethics and discovering the sense of the world, his conclusion that the question of the meaning of life makes no sense, and his turning to experience the mystical aspect of the world; Sartre's positing of freedom as the basis of human life, stipulating a personal answer to the question of the meaning of life; and Camus' view of the absurdity of life, unalleviated by any personal meaning. Guided by these views, Lurie imparts new insight to ideas that underlie our concern with life's meaning, such as the difference between attitudes toward life and beliefs and opinions about life, the meaning of words versus the meaning of events, shared meanings versus personal meanings, and the link between ethics and personal identity. Tracking the Meaning of Life is no mere dry philosophical study but a journey that dramatically illustrates the poignancy of the quest for meaning, showing that along the way it gradually becomes more obvious how personal meaning may be found in the pulsations of everyday life. The book offers stimulating reading not only for scholars in philosophy but also for general readers who wish to see how their personal concerns are echoed in modern philosophical thought. More than a description of a journey, it is a map to anxieties and puzzlements we all face, pointing to ideas that can guide readers on their own search for meaning.
 

Continguts

Introduction
1
chapter 1 Tolstoy Confesses Publicly and Tells the Story of Ivan Ilych
11
chapter 2 A Philosophical Question
21
chapter 3 An Existential Question
32
chapter 4 An Ancient Question
43
chapter 5 A Modern Question
58
chapter 6 A Defiant Question
71
chapter 7 A Solution that Chases a Dream
79
chapter 18 Life Journeys and Personal SelfIdentity
178
chapter 19 Attributing Personal Meaning to Life
192
chapter 20 A Phenomenological Ontology
202
chapter 21 Freedom as a Problematic Human Mode of Existence
212
chapter 22 An Existentialist Ethics
221
chapter 23 An Existentialist Conception of Meaning
232
chapter 24 Affirmation through Criticism
241
chapter 25 Camus Tells the Stories of Meursault and Sisyphus
249

chapter 8 Wittgenstein Turns to Philosophy
89
chapter 9 The Logical Limits of the World
97
chapter 10 The Cognitive Limits of the World
105
chapter 11 The Ethical Limits of the World
115
chapter 12 The Meaning of Life as the Sense of the World
125
chapter 13 Mystical Experience as a Substitute for Ethics
136
chapter 14 Overcoming the Problem of Life
144
chapter 15 What Cannot Be Put into Words but Makes Itself Manifest
152
chapter 16 Assessing Wittgenstein s View on the Meaning of Life
160
chapter 17 Sartre Takes the Train to Dijon
171
chapter 26 Sartre Disputes Camus
256
chapter 27 Hare Disputes Camus
266
chapter 28 Nagel Disputes Camus
276
chapter 29 Meaning Blindness and Alien LifeForms
288
chapter 30 The Soul of Life
299
chapter 31 The Moral of Camus s Story
309
epilogue Poor Man s Wisdom
315
bibliography
329
index
333
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Pàgina 23 - ... what is the right thing?' he asked himself, and suddenly grew quiet. This occurred at the end of the third day, two hours before h|s death. Just then his schoolboy son had crept softly in and gone up to the bedside. The dying man was still screaming desperately and waving his arms. His hand fell on the boy's head, and the boy caught it, pressed it to his lips, and began to cry.
Pàgina 23 - And suddenly it grew clear to him that what had been oppressing him and would not leave him was all dropping away at once from two sides, from ten sides, and from all sides. He was sorry for them, he must act so as not to hurt them: release them and free himself from these sufferings. "How good and how simple!

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