Tyler Sproule: Dissertation Defense July 27, 2026
Tyler successfully defended his dissertation on July 27, 2026
Tyler Sproule successfully defended his dissertation "Meaningful Beings: An Enactive Account of Meaning", on July 27, 2026.
Abstract:
A growing number of philosophers have come to emphasize an important distinction between questions concerned with the meaning of life and questions concerned with meaning in life. Questions concerned with the former ask (among other things) about cosmic purposes or the overall ‘point’ of being or existing. Questions focused on the latter, however, ask what, if anything, makes our lives meaningful — that is, what kind of unifying principle or description might be given to lives correctly characterized as possessing meaning? In this dissertation, I seek to address this latter question in a new way by using conceptual tools taken from both applied phenomenology and enactive philosophy of mind. In order to develop my view, I first argue that while important elements of living meaningfully are captured by the main philosophical camps central to the analytic debate on meaning in life, none of the views on offer adequately accounts for what is desired when we wish to live meaningfully. One reason for this is that each theoretical camp has been centrally concerned with determining which life-pursuits are or are not meaningful, and thereby do or do not lend meaning to one’s life. In tension with these views, I argue that life-pursuits views assume, incorrectly, that feelings of meaning are essentially intentional (i.e., object-directed) affective states. I maintain, in contrast, that feelings of meaning are more often non-localized, pre-intentional moods — i.e., affective backdrops within which an individual’s intentional thoughts and emotions occur. I conclude from this that before one even begins to fully engage in life-pursuits that may or may not enhance the meaningfulness of one’s life, one must already find oneself in a meaningful experiential world in which such pursuits make sense, feel achievable, or appear as significant. Leading from this conclusion, and making use of conceptual tools taken from enactive philosophy of mind, I then propose a novel account of meaning in life. On my view, living meaningfully is a way of being in the world that engenders fitting (i.e., non-pathological) feelings of meaning. In enactive terms, fitting feelings of meaning are characterized by an expansive and multifaceted field of affordances that adequately tracks the affordance landscape — the abstract set of affordances available to a given agent. This expansive sense of possibility may be experienced as an active interest in a multitude of activities, an appreciation for the diversity and nuance of immediate experience, hope toward the future, the sense that one’s world makes sense or fits together, along with the belief that who one is, and what one does, matters to others. A primary takeaway of this view, in contrast to life-pursuits views, is that a life can be richly meaningful even in the absence of ground projects around which one’s life is organized
Modified on August 27, 2026