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Books

Doing Valuable Time by Cheshire Calhoun

James Wakefield finds out that meaning need not be monumental.

Is your time well spent? In Doing Valuable Time (2018), the American philosopher Cheshire Calhoun takes apart this familiar yet difficult question, finding that the activities that make our lives meaningful – those activities on which it is worth spending our time – are not always what we expect them to be.

Calhoun contends that the issue of meaningfulness is rooted in two basic features of humans. One is that we are ‘evaluators’: we are disposed to make decisions after weighing up our options and determining what seems to us best. Whether or not a given course of action would be a meaningful use of our time is inextricably tied up with our reasons to pursue it. The other feature is that we are ‘temporally oriented beings’.

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