Christine Vitrano's Essay On Meaning In Life By Susan Wolf

What’s that mean?

1. In life we tend to question if what were are doing is meaningful yet we don’t know the standards for something to be meaningful. Before I read this paper I believed that meaningful was what we thought was important to ourselves not others but in this paper Meaning in Life by Susan Wolf pages 795-798 the argument for what a meaningful life consists of is presented as such:

2.

1. A meaningful life is one based on needs which are characterized as needs for meaning. 2. For an activity to have meaning one must be actively engaged. 3. The activity has meaning if it is a project with objective worth. 4. Therefore, a life has meaning if a person displays subjective attention to an activity with objective worth. 3. In life we tend to wonder if our lives are

Christine Vitrano’s paper Meaningful Lives? On pages 799-800 questions Wolf’s argument. Vitrano points out that Wolf relies the worth of an activity based on the intuitions. What Wolf does not take into consideration is that others might value activities she thinks are worthless and vice versa. Vitrano points out that Wolf is being too subjective in considering the meaningfulness or meaninglessness of an activity. The mistake that Vitrano is attempting to point out is that Wolf believes that people agree on which activities are justly valuable. Vitrano presents an example of a physicist who uses science to bring out the enjoyment but is dedicated to chess because of the challenge it brings him. The scientist research would be considered meaningless because it would not be worthwhile for him yet the dedication to the chess would be meaningful because it is what he enjoys and is actively engaged in regardless if Wolf thinks it lacks worth he is still living a meaningful life. Wolf relies on the objective value of an activity for it to be meaningful yet she never explain what an objective value is and what it takes in order for an activity to be