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Existential nihilism is the philosophical theory that life has no objective meaning or purpose. [1] The inherent meaninglessness of life is largely explored in the philosophical school of existentialism, where one can potentially create their own subjective "meaning" or "purpose".
[1] [2] It is contrasted with the "easy problems" of explaining why and how physical systems give a (healthy) human being the ability to discriminate, to integrate information, and to perform behavioral functions such as watching, listening, speaking (including generating an utterance that appears to refer to personal behaviour or belief), and ...
Plato (c. 428 – c. 347 BCE) teaches in the Republic that a life committed to knowledge and virtue will result in happiness and self-realization.To achieve happiness, one should become immune to changes in the material world and strive to gain the knowledge of the eternal, immutable forms that reside in the realm of ideas.
The lexical ambiguity of a word or phrase applies to it having more than one meaning in the language to which the word belongs. [4] "Meaning" here refers to whatever should be represented by a good dictionary. For instance, the word "bank" has several distinct lexical definitions, including "financial institution" and "edge of a river".
Peter Marris suggests that the process of abandoning a conviction is similar to the working out of grief. "The impulse to defend the predictability of life is a fundamental and universal principle of human psychology." Human beings possess "a deep-rooted and insistent need for continuity". [31]
The terms empirical and observable are closely related and sometimes used as synonyms. [19] There is an active debate in contemporary philosophy of science as to what should be regarded as observable or empirical in contrast to unobservable or merely theoretical objects. There is general consensus that everyday objects like books or houses are ...
Strong social constructivism as a philosophical approach tends to suggest that "the natural world has a small or non-existent role in the construction of scientific knowledge". [4] According to Maarten Boudry and Filip Buekens, Freudian psychoanalysis is a good example of this approach in action. [ 5 ]
Many researchers have attempted to identify the psychological process which creates the availability heuristic. Tversky and Kahneman argue that the number of examples recalled from memory is used to infer the frequency with which such instances occur. In an experiment to test this explanation, participants listened to lists of names containing ei