April 23, 2025 – Philosophy Graduation Celebration – “Meaning in Practice”

April 23, 2025 – Philosophy Graduation Celebration – “Meaning in Practice” – A Presentation by Tiger Roholt (Montclair Philosophy)

Where?
Schmitt Hall, Room 110

When?
2:00–3:30PM

At this event, there will be a 30-minute presentation by Roholt (of the paper, “Meaning in Practice”), Q&A, then an appreciation of our graduating majors, and finally, casual conversation over refreshments.

Abstract of “Meaning in Practice”:  Susan Wolf holds that there are two, main conditions that must be satisfied for an activity or project to add meaning to one’s life: you must be subjectively fulfilled by the activity, and the activity must be objectively valuable. By “objective value” she means this: “[A] project or activity must possess a value whose source comes from outside of oneself—whose value, in other words, is in part independent of one’s own attitude to it.”*  She comes to call this “nonsubjective value” (42, 45). A significant shortcoming of Wolf’s view is that she does not offer an account of nonsubjective value. I suggest that the concept of a practice is helpful here. A practice is an array of human activity that is structured by standards or norms. Most of Wolf’s examples of activities that she takes to be nonsubjectively valuable occur within practices: playing cello, writing philosophy or poetry, academic research, gardening, carpentry, being a pastry chef, participating in a crossword-solving competition, playing chess, and so on. In After Virtue, Alasdair MacIntyre sets out a particularly robust conception of practice, whereby practices involve, not only a structured array of activity, but also goods internal to practices.†  What are a practice’s internal goods? To take the example of the practice of chess, the internal goods include the achievement of competitive intensity, the acquisition of a particular kind of analytical skill, and the cultivation of strategic imagination. In this essay, I argue that, regarding Wolf’s practice-based examples, their nonsubjective value rests in the practice’s internal goods. If you are subjectively fulfilled by playing chess, it will add meaning to your life; the nonsubjective value of chess rests in its internal goods.

* Wolf, Susan. Meaning in Life and Why it Matters. Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2010, 37.
† MacIntyre, Alasdair. After Virtue: A Study in Moral Theory. Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 2007 [1981].

Brought to you by the Department of Philosophy at Montclair State University