This is philosophy bites with me David Edmonds and me Nigel Warton.

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Today we're discussing a minor trivial

inconsequential topic the meaning of life. It's a subject that threatens to

descend into philosophical caricature, the sort that might have been

satirized in Monty Python or Douglas Adams.

But Professor John Cottingham of Reading University thinks that the meaning of life is worthy

of serious philosophical consideration.

John Cottingham, welcome to Philosophy Bites.

Today I'd like to ask you about a topic that is quite serious for most of us,

the meaning of life.

What do you think the meaning of life is?

Well, I can't give you a quick one sentence answer on that.

But the topic's been very exciting to me

because it was a topic which when I was undergraduate,

it was one of those that we were all told philosophy doesn't deal with.

And one of the exciting things about the subject is it's become a much broader and richer subject since I was a student and the

traditional grand questions of philosophy are now on the agenda again. There's been a

whole rash of material on questions like the meaning of life. The answer to the question is a complicated

one. The main problem about human existence is its fragility. The projects which we embark on are constantly in danger of foundering because of ordinary contingencies of life.

...