Overview

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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David Benatar is currently senior lecturer in the philosophy department at the University of Cape Town, South Africa. He received his PhD from that university, did post-doctoral work at the University of Wisconsin-Madison from 1993 to 1995, and was visiting assistant professor at the College of Charleston, South Carolina, from 1995 until 1997. His teaching and research interests are in moral philosophy and related areas. In 1999 he was awarded the University of Cape Town's Distinguished Teacher Award. Dennis Kleinman has been narrating audiobooks since 2013 and has at least forty titles to his credit. His career began with a biography of a British general, Sir David Fraser, and then transitioned into a series of period romance audiobooks. He has also narrated half a dozen nautical themed audiobooks, as well as South African themed works that include The Lion Seeker and The Zebra Affaire. He lives with his family in Los Angeles.

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