Rivka Weinberg, "The Meaning of It All: Ultimate Meaning, Everyday Meaning, Cosmic Meaning, Death, and Time" (Oxford UP, 2026)
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What question about life’s overall purpose does the episode open with?
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Welcome to the new books network.
Welcome to New Books in Philosophy, part of the New Books Network. My name is Blaine Neufeld. I'm a professor of philosophy who specializes in political and moral theory. And I'm an interviewer here at New Books in Philosophy, along with Carrie Figdore and Sarah Tyson. Many of us have, on occasion, wondered about the point of certain aspects of our lives, such as our jobs, our goals, or our relationships. We ask, what is the point of this? Some of us go further and ask questions like, What is the point of it all? Does my life have any overarching meaning? Can it have any overarching meaning? In a recent book from Oxford University Press entitled The Meaning of It All, Rivka Weinberg, who is a professor of philosophy and the Mary W.
and J. Stanley Johnson Chair in the Humanities at Scripps College, endeavors to answer these and related questions. She argues that our lives cannot have any ultimate meaning, but this depressing fact doesn't entail that the things that we are doing during our lives can't have genuine meaning. Provocatively, she also argues that neither God, should such an entity exist, nor death, which we know exists, make any difference to these questions about meaning, or at least not any real difference. In contrast, time makes meaning both possible, yet also drains it from the world. The Meaning of It All asks big questions and provides surprising answers to those questions, but does so in an engaging and entertaining way.
We are fortunate to have the author of The Meaning of It All, Rivka Weinberg, here with us today. Hello, Rivka.
Hi, Blaine. Thank you for having me.
Well, thanks for agreeing to do this interview. Let's start by getting to know a little bit about you. Perhaps you could say a few things about who you are, where you're from, your background, and how you became interested in philosophy. And perhaps you might situate your scholarly work overall within the broader landscape of contemporary philosophy.
Thanks. So um I'm from Brooklyn and I uh come from um an immigrant family. I have ten siblings. I worked my way through school at Brooklyn College uh at night and then I went to the University of Michigan for a grad school. Um and I have always been interested in philosophy, but I didn't know what it was. I kind of stumbled into it in Brooklyn College because they had a lot of requirements. And philosophy was one of them. And uh and it was open, the class was open, so I took it uh early on uh while I started as an English major, which I kept. But I, you know, that's I I think to me, philosophy is the questions that I would be surprised if everyone wasn't interested in. What's the right thing to do? What do we know?
You know, what's the point of living? I think those are sort of uh human questions. That any thinking person would care about. And so yeah, I care a lot about them. And I write about these kinds of questions, which are sort of existential in a lot of ways, which can put it in. uh sort of a continentalist camp of continental philosophy, but I write about these questions in a uh um uh contemporary sort of analytic kind of style with uh clear arguments um and reasoning. So uh that's how I would situate my work within um contemporary philosophy.
Great, that's really interesting. So let's turn to the uh topic of the book, the meaning of it all. The topic is of obvious interest to many people. To non-academics, questions like, what is the point of life? or does death rob life of meaning are paradigmatic philosophical questions. You know, if you were to find yourself talking to someone on an airplane and they found out you were a philosopher, they probably would ask, What's your philosophy of life, for instance?
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Chapters
3 chapters
1
What question about life’s overall purpose does the episode open with?
0:00–9:27
2
How does Rivka Weinberg define the six characteristics of meaning (value, significance, impact, explanation, purpose, point)?
9:27–23:00
3
What are the three kinds of meaning (everyday, cosmic, ultimate) and how do they differ?
23:00–49:59
Speakers
2 identifiedMore from New Books in Philosophy
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