The Human Predicament: A Candid Guide to Life's Biggest Questions
David Benatar
Feb 2023 · Tantor Media Inc · Narrated by Dennis Kleinman
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6 hr 55 min
Unabridged
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About this audiobook
Are our lives meaningful, or meaningless? Is our inevitable death a bad thing? Would immortality be an improvement? Would it be better to hasten our deaths by suicide? Many people ask these big questions-and some people are plagued by them. Analytic philosophers have said relatively little about these important questions. The Human Predicament invites listeners to take a clear-eyed and unfettered view of the human condition. David Benatar here offers a substantial, but not unmitigated, pessimism about the central questions of human existence. He argues that while our lives can have some meaning, we are ultimately the insignificant beings that we fear we might be. He maintains that the quality of life leaves much to be desired in even the best cases. Worse, death is generally not a solution; in fact, it exacerbates rather than mitigates our cosmic meaninglessness. While it can release us from suffering, it imposes another cost-annihilation. This state of affairs has nuanced implications for how we should think about many things, including immortality and suicide, and how we should think about the possibility of deeper meaning in our lives. Ultimately, this thoughtful, provocative, and deeply candid treatment of life's big questions will interest anyone who has contemplated why we are here, and what the answer means for how we should live.
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About the author
David Benatar is currently senior lecturer in the philosophy department at the University of Cape Town, South Africa.
Dennis Kleinman has been narrating audiobooks since 2013 and has at least forty titles to his credit. Born in Cape Town, South Africa, he currently lives in Los Angeles.
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