ABSTRACT
Not all important-sounding questions make sense. For a fair part of the twentieth century it was common in much of the anglophone world to dismiss many of the traditional grand
questions of philosophy as pseudo-questions. People who felt perplexed by the ancient puzzle of the meaning of life were firmly reminded that meaning was a notion properly confined to the arena of language: words or sentences or propositions could be said to have meaning, but not objects or events in the world, like the lives of trees, or lobsters, or humans. So the very idea that philosophy could inquire into the meaning of life was taken as a sign of conceptual confusion. The solution to the problem, as Ludwig Wittgenstein once remarked, would lie in its disappearance.2
