Meaning, Purpose, and Belonging

By Kjell Fostervold

When my students are introduced to thinking about the meaning of life for the first time, the first word out of their mouths is ‘purpose’. However, philosophers have mostly neglected purpose: almost without exception they have assumed that any role for purpose must be connected with God, the divine, cosmic plans, and so on.

This seems to me an important oversight, given that (1) non-philosophers immediately advert to purpose when discussing meaning & (2) the notion of purpose plays an important role in the empirical psychological literature on meaning. Therefore, it seems to me that we ought to take seriously the role that purpose might play even in secular accounts of meaning in life. But just what role might it play? What is purpose?

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