Jeff Noonan "Eating, Working, Laughing: Embodied Humanist Values for the Twenty-First Century"

Jeff Noonan will reflect upon a quarter-century of work as a philosopher considering the goods of human life. His peregrinations have led to the general conclusion that our practical, intellectual, and artistic engagement with the world of things, creatures, and other people are the source of the values that make life as an embodied, mortal, human being good. The content of this good varies across historical time and cultural space, the shared material problems posed by life on Earth point us toward three shared forms of value. Life is sensuously enjoyable when our natural and social needs are satisfied. Life is meaningful when our work contributes to the satisfaction of other’s needs. Life is fulfilling when we accept that each person has a beginning and an ending and free ourselves from the desire for more than what such a finite life can provide.

 

Jeff Noonan is a professor in the Department of Philosophy at the University of Windsor. He is the author of Critical Humanism and the Politics of Difference (2003), Democratic Society and Human Needs (2006), Materialist Ethics and Life-Value (2012), Embodiment and the Meaning of Life (2019), The Troubles with Democracy (2020), and the forthcoming Embodied Humanism: Toward Solidarity and Sensuous Enjoyment. He has also published widely in academic journals, the alternative press, and online, at www.jeffnoonan.org.