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In
What Do We Mean When We Talk About Meaning?, Steven Cassedy tells the story of "meaning." The word began by denoting "signifying" and "intending," but came to acquire a broad array of sub-definitions. The book begins with the early Christian thinkers who believed meaning could be "read" from the world as if it were holy scripture, then moves into the philosophers who adapted this notion and eventually the romantic-era Germans that coined "the meaning of life," a phrase that later traveled to Great Britain, the United States, and Russia. The book also extends into the twentieth century, when "meaning" acquired its greatest power in the realms of religion, psychotherapy, and self-help, all of which helped it to accumulate the fluidity and ambiguity it still displays today.
List of contents
- Introduction. This Shifting, Ubiquitous Word
- Chapter 1. The Ancient World Got Along without it till the Rise of Christianity
- Chapter 2. Christianity, Scripture, and "Reading" the World, from Augustine to Bishop Berkeley
- Chapter 3. Idealism and Romanticism: From the Language of Nature to the Meaning of Life (or The World)
- Chapter 4. Thomas Carlyle and Ralph Waldo Emerson Bring the "Mystery of Existence" and the "Sense of Life" to the English-Speaking World
- Chapter 5. Two Russian Titans Weigh in
- Chapter 6. Paul Tillich: Bridge to the Twentieth Century and the "Age of Anxiety"
- Chapter 7. Meaning in the Age of Anxiety and Well Beyond
- Chapter 8. Meaning Goes Clinical, Therapeutic, and Popular
- Chapter 9. Meaning Bridges the Secular, the Secular Sacred, and the Sacred
- Conclusion. The Marvel of Meaning
About the author
Steven Cassedy is the author of six previous books, including
To the Other Shore: The Russian Jewish Intellectuals Who Came to America (Princeton, 1997),
Dostoevsky's Religion (Stanford, 2005), and
Connected: How Trains, Genes, Pineapples, Piano Keys, and a Few Disasters Transformed Americans at the Dawn of the Twentieth Century (Stanford, 2014), which won a gold medal in US history at the Independent Publisher Book Awards (IPPY). He retired as a Distinguished Professor of Literature and Associate Dean of the Graduate Division at the University of California, San Diego, in 2018 and now lives with his wife Patrice, a playwright, in Riverdale, Bronx.
Summary
In What Do We Mean When We Talk About Meaning?, Steven Cassedy tells the story of
Additional text
How did the words 'meaning' and 'life' become connected? Steven Cassedy's remarkable intellectual history provides the first comprehensive answer, by tracing the connection from the ancient world, to German Romanticism, to the Catholic Church's adoption of the language of 'meaning' in the 1960s. It's quite a story, very irreverently told, and once you know it you might not want a meaningful life anymore.
