Philosophy and Meaning in Life Vol. 4: Selected Papers from the Pretoria Conference

This book is a collection of all the papers published in the special issue “Philosophy and Meaning in Life Vol.4: Selected Papers from the Pretoria Conference,” Journal of Philosophy of Life, Vol.12, No.1, 2022, pp.1-115. We held the Fourth International Conference on Philosophy and Meaning in Life online at the University of Pretoria, Pretoria, South Africa, on January 17–19, 2022. This conference was hosted by the University of Pretoria and supported by the Waseda Institute of Life and Death Studies. We accepted about 50 presentations from around the world. Professor Cheshire Calhoun, Professor Guy Kahane, and Professor Berit Brogaard gave keynote lectures. After the conference, we called for papers for publication from the speakers, and we accepted six papers for the special issue of the Journal of Philosophy of Life. We would like to give special thanks to the anonymous referees who kindly reviewed the submitted manuscripts. The accepted papers deal with a variety of topics, such as the methodology of ethics, the meaning of affirmation, Simone de Beauvoir, and subjectivism, and they are all discussed from the perspective of the philosophy of life’s meaning. In January 2022, we were still in the midst of the Covid19 pandemic. Professor Thaddeus Metz, the chair of the conference, and supporting staff members decided to hold the conference online, and with the help of their devotion we were able to hold the three–day meeting successfully. We had many participants from around the world and we had lively discussions online. I would like to sincerely thank them for their contributions. As the editor-in-chief, I hope that readers will enjoy the stimulating papers in this volume