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  1.  78
    Meaningfulness as Sensefulness.Joshua Lewis Thomas - 2019 - Philosophia 47 (5):1555-1577.
    It is only in the last few decades that analytic philosophers in particular have begun to pay any serious attention to the topic of life’s meaning. Such philosophers, however, do not usually attempt to answer or analyse the traditional question ‘What is the meaning of life?’, but rather the subtly different question ‘What makes a life meaningful?’ and it is generally assumed that the latter can be discussed independently of the former. Nevertheless, this paper will argue that the two questions (...)
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  2. Can Only Human Lives Be Meaningful?Joshua Lewis Thomas - 2018 - Philosophical Papers 47 (2):265-297.
    Duncan Purves and Nicolas Delon have argued that one’s life will be meaningful to the extent that one contributes to valuable states of affairs and this contribution is a result of one’s intentional actions. They then argue, contrary to some theorists’ intuitions, that non-human animals are capable of fulfilling these requirements, and that this finding might entail important things for the animal ethics movement. In this paper, I also argue that things besides human beings can have meaningful existences, but I (...)
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  3.  54
    Authenticity and Contact Value.Joshua Lewis Thomas - 2023 - Journal of Value Inquiry 57 (3):427-446.
  4.  52
    When does Something ‘Belong’ to a Culture?Joshua Lewis Thomas - 2021 - British Journal of Aesthetics 61 (3):275-290.
    Cultural appropriation can be understood as involving members of one culture taking or adopting objects or practices which ‘belong’ to another culture in the sense of being affiliated or connected to that other culture in a unique or special way. But what constitutes this ‘belonging’ precisely? This paper proposes that belonging, in the targeted sense, is determined by meaningful connections between an object or practice and the relevant culture—in other words, connections that could be described as the thing’s ‘meanings’. Such (...)
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  5.  32
    On the Ethics of Reconstructing Destroyed Cultural Heritage Monuments.William Bülow & Joshua Lewis Thomas - 2020 - Journal of the American Philosophical Association 6 (4):483-501.
    Philosophers, archeologists, and other heritage professionals often take a rather negative view of heritage reconstruction, holding that it is inappropriate or even impermissible. In this essay, we argue that taking such hardline attitudes toward the reconstruction of heritage is unjustified. To the contrary, we believe that the reconstruction of heritage can be both permissible and beneficial, all things considered. In other words, sometimes we have good reasons, on balance, to pursue reconstructions, and doing so can be morally acceptable. In defending (...)
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  6.  20
    Is the desire for a meaningful life a selfless desire?Joshua Lewis Thomas - 2019 - Human Affairs 29 (4):445-452.
    Susan Wolf defines a meaningful life as one that is somewhat successfully engaged in promoting positive value. I grant this claim; however, I disagree with Wolf’s theory about why we desire meaningfulness, so understood. She suggests that the human desire for meaningfulness is derived from an awareness of ourselves as equally insignificant in the universe and a resulting anti-solipsistic concern for promoting goodness outside the boundaries of our own lives. I accept that this may succeed in explaining why people want (...)
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  7.  42
    Does Death Render Life Absurd?Joshua Lewis Thomas - 2019 - Southern Journal of Philosophy 57 (3):428-453.
    In this paper, I assess the claim that death renders life absurd. First, I characterize absurdity as something we perceive in situations involving extreme disharmonies which strike us as unexpected or unacceptable. Next, I outline several potential disharmonies which death might introduce into our existence (such as the disharmony between our dignity and capacities, and the undignified annihilation which death promises), but suggest that these examples need not be seen as necessarily absurd; there are perspectives available to us from which (...)
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  8.  22
    Heritage and War: Ethical Issues.William Bülow, Helen Frowe, Derek Matravers & Joshua Lewis Thomas (eds.) - 2023 - Oxford, GB: Oxford University Press.
    The destruction of cultural heritage in war is currently attracting considerable attention. ISIS’s campaign of deliberate destruction across the Middle East was met with widespread horror and calls for some kind of international response. The United States attracted criticism for both its accidental damaging of Ancient Babylon in 2015 and its failure to protect the Mosul Museum from looters in 2003. In 2016, the International Criminal Court prosecuted its first case of the destruction of heritage as a war crime. While (...)
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