Abstract
While it is widely thought that activities and lives can be meaningful or meaningless, this chapter explores the possibility that they could also be ‘anti-meaningful’. Anti-meaning is the opposite of meaning. This chapter has two main objectives: first, it discusses what an ti-meaning is (or could be taken to be); second, it discusses whether there are good rea sons to add this unfamiliar notion to our set of concepts for thinking about meaning in life. The authors review the limited literature on this topic, distinguish two formal inter pretations of the idea of anti-meaning, and propose different substantive theories of anti- meaning that correspond to leading theories of meaning. They then defend the notion of anti-meaning against scepticism about the usefulness of this concept.
| Original language | English |
|---|---|
| Title of host publication | Oxford Handbook of Meaning in Life |
| Editors | Iddo Landau |
| Place of Publication | Oxford |
| Publisher | Oxford University Press |
| Chapter | 17 |
| Pages | 277–291 |
| Number of pages | 14 |
| ISBN (Electronic) | 9780190063535 |
| ISBN (Print) | 9780190063504 |
| DOIs | |
| Publication status | Published - 20 Apr 2022 |