中山大学哲学系（珠海）研究生前沿讲座系列第十一讲：The Book of Life

内容简介

In this lecture I shall present one direction of my research, which focuses on the question of life’s meaning. In popular culture, philosophy is often associated— sometimes seriously, sometimes mockingly— with the question “what is the meaning of life?”. Yet, it is only in recent decades that research into the question of life’s meaning, or the meaningful life, became systematic and intense. It is now a growing a sub-discipline in both philosophy and psychology. In the present lecture, I focus on exploring the connection between the concept of ‘meaning’ as it is used in the context of investigating life’s meaning (viz. existential meaning), and the concept of ‘meaning’ as it is used in linguistics, semiotics, and the philosophy of mind and language (i.e., semantic meaning). I explain how these two concepts are used in their specific domains, and examine whether there are robust conceptual, as well as historical, connections between them. The emerging picture highlights the differences, but also points to intriguing communalities.