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Letters

Letters

The Meaning of Life • Muhammed • Violent Response

The Meaning of Life

SIR: I was astonished by the lack of rigour of Richard Taylor’s contribution to the ‘Meaning of Life’ symposium in the Summer issue of Philosophy Now. But I must admit that it is an equally unrigorous gut feeling that drives me to point out the rather obvious holes in Professor Taylor’s argument: a feeling that there must be something wrong in a position that reserves meaning for the lives of a minute intellectual and artistic elite and condemns the vast majority of human beings to the meaninglessness of slavery in support of that elite.

But to the holes! “The robin…is doing exactly what those you saw as a child were doing, and the same as those seen by our distant ancestors. The species has no history.” But our very distant ancestors did not see any robins.