Imperfect Cognitions

On 9th September 2019, Yujin Nagasawa organised and hosted a workshop on Life, Death and Meaning – Eastern and Western Perspectives in the Muirhead Tower at the University of Birmingham, in collaboration with researchers at the University of Tokyo and Waseda University. Muirhead Tower The first speaker, Norichika Horie (University of Tokyo), presented on Spirituality and Meaning of Life and addressed several themes in our philosophical understanding of meaning. He started from the meaning of meaning . In Chinese and Japanese “imi” (meaning) is about externalising and verbalising something internal and has important links with intention. “Imi” is an emotion that stays in the mouth and doesn’t turn into words, it is affective and preverbal. But is meaning something to be explored or something to be produced? Norichika Horie According to Norichika Horie, the relationship between life and death is crucial to what we think about meaning. The story of life ends with deat...

This post is by  Tim Crane . I am Professor of Philosophy at the Central European University (CEU) in Budapest. I was Knightbridge Professor of Philosophy at the University of Cambridge and he taught at UCL for almost twenty years. I founded the Institute of Philosophy in the University of London , and I am the philosophy editor of the TLS .  I have written five books on the nature of the mind, which is my principal area of interest in philosophy. But I also have a long-standing interest in the nature of religion and religious belief, and The Meaning of Belief is my first serious attempt to write on this subject. The Meaning of Belief attempts to give a description of the phenomenon of religion from an atheist’s point of view — that is, on the assumption that there is no god, supernatural or transcendent reality or being. The book’s aim is not to argue for this atheism, but to give a description of religious belief which makes sense to believers themselves. In t...