ABSTRACT
In post-war Britain, academic philosophers did not talk about the meaning of life. Analytic philosophy dominated British philosophy, and this kind of philosophy was, at the time, dominated by investigations of logic, language, mind and knowledge. Moral philosophy, along with aesthetics, mostly hid in a corner. But creeping out of that corner, discussion of meaning in a richer sense than occupied most philosophy of language began to make its way. In 1976 a distinguished analytic philosopher, David Wiggins, delivered a paper called ‘Truth, Invention and the Meaning of Life’. He began in these words:
Even now, in an age not given much to mysticism, there are people who ask ‘What is the meaning of life?’ Not a few of them make the simple ‘un-philosophical’ assumption that there is something to be known here. (One might say they are ‘cognitivists’ with regard to this sort of question.) And most of these same people make the equally unguarded assumption that the whole issue of life’s meaning presupposes some positive answer to the question whether it can be plainly and straightforwardly true that this or that thing or activity or pursuit is good, or has value, or is worth something. Finally, something even harder, they suppose that questions like that of life’s meaning must be among the central questions of moral philosophy.
