The Human Predicament: A Candid Guide to Life's Biggest Questions

ISBN-13: 9780190633813 / Angielski / Twarda / 2017 / 288 str.

David Benatar

Opis

Are our lives meaningful, or meaningless? Is our inevitable death a bad thing? Would immortality be an improvement? Would it be better, all things considered, to hasten our deaths by suicide? Many people ask these big questions -- and some people are plagued by them. Surprisingly, analytic philosophers have said relatively little about these important questions about the meaning of life. When they have tackled the big questions, they have tended, like popular writers, to offer comforting, optimistic answers. The Human Predicament invites readers to take a clear-eyed and unfettered view of the human condition.

David Benatar here offers a substantial, but not unmitigated, pessimism about the central questions of human existence. He argues that while our lives can have some meaning, we are ultimately the insignificant beings that we fear we might be. He maintains that the quality of life, although less bad for some than for others, leaves much to be desired in even the best cases. Worse, death is generally not a solution; in fact, it exacerbates rather than mitigates our cosmic meaninglessness. While it can release us from suffering, it imposes another cost - annihilation. This state of affairs has nuanced implications for how we should think about many things, including immortality and suicide, and how we should think about the possibility of deeper meaning in our lives. Ultimately, this thoughtful, provocative, and deeply candid treatment of life's big questions will interest anyone who has contemplated why we are here, and what the answer means for how we should live.

Recenzje

David Benatar's new book, The Human Predicament, offers justifiably pessimistic analyses of some of the most interesting and important issues of human existence, including birth, suffering, death, and suicide. Benatar's analyses are as beautifully crafted and written as they are scholarly and thoughtful. The Human Predicament is a grand work of philosophy, but contains important insights for many of the social and life sciences, including psychology, sociology, biology, as well as to medicine and law. Not only will I recommend this book to my colleagues and graduate and undergraduate students, but I also will recommend it to my family and friends. The Human Predicament is a stunning achievement by a deeply compassionate man.

O autorze

David Benatar is Professor of Philosophy and the Head of the Philosophy department at University of Cape Town, South Africa. He is the author of Better Never to Have Been: The Harm of Coming Into Existence (2006) and Debating Procreation: Is it Wrong to Reproduce? (2015).