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The first English use of the expression "meaning of life" appears in Thomas Carlyle's Sartor Resartus (1833–1834), book II chapter IX, "The Everlasting Yea". [1]Our Life is compassed round with Necessity; yet is the meaning of Life itself no other than Freedom, than Voluntary Force: thus have we a warfare; in the beginning, especially, a hard-fought battle.
Anthropic reasoning has been used to address the question as to why certain measured physical constants take the values that they do, rather than some other arbitrary values, and to explain a perception that the universe appears to be finely tuned for the existence of life. There are many different formulations of the anthropic principle.
The proposition that existence precedes essence (French: l'existence précède l'essence) is a central claim of existentialism, which reverses the traditional philosophical view that the essence (the nature) of a thing is more fundamental and immutable than its existence (the mere fact of its being). [1] To existentialists, human beings ...
Despite the fact that the word animal is colloquially used as an antonym for human, [11] and contrary to a common biological misconception, humans are animals. [12] The word person is often used interchangeably with human , but philosophical debate exists as to whether personhood applies to all humans or all sentient beings , and further if a ...
This question has been written about by philosophers since at least the ancient Parmenides (c. 515 BC). [1] [2]"Why is there anything at all?" or "Why is there something rather than nothing?" is a question about the reason for basic existence which has been raised or commented on by a range of philosophers and physicists, including Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, [3] Ludwig Wittgenstein, [4] and ...
Human beings, writes social anthropologist Ernest Gellner, are not genetically programmed to be members of this or that social order. You can take a human infant and place it into any kind of social order and it will function acceptably. What makes human society so distinctive is the fabulous range of quite different forms it takes across the ...
Existential nihilism is the philosophical theory that life has no objective meaning or purpose. [1] The inherent meaninglessness of life is largely explored in the philosophical school of existentialism, where one can potentially create their own subjective "meaning" or "purpose".
[1] The concept of the struggle for existence (or struggle for life) concerns the competition or battle for resources needed to live. It can refer to human society, or to organisms in nature. The concept is ancient, and the term struggle for existence was in use by the end of the 18th century.