Iddo Landau

Aufenthalt

Oktober 2025 – September 2026

Forschungsthema

»Pessimism, Optimism, and the Meaning of Life«

Projektbeschreibung

My project suggests a comprehensive atheist defense of optimism regarding life’s goodness and meaningfulness. The position advocated is philosophically moderate: it does not claim that all lives are good but rather that for many people life is overall more good than bad and that for many others it could become so. Further, I argue that contrary to modern anti-natalistic claims, for many individuals it is better to have come to existence rather than never to have come to existence at all. The project also argues that, overall, human life has greatly improved rather than deteriorated in recent centuries and decades—and may well continue to do so. In arguing for these claims the project critically engages with various forms of philosophical and political pessimism, from classical to contemporary ones.

Wissenschaftliches Profil

Iddo Landau ist Professor für Philosophie an der Universität Haifa, Israel. Er ist spezialisiert auf die Philosophie des Sinns im Leben und die Debatte um Optimismus und Pessimismus. Er ist Herausgeber des Oxford Handbook of Meaning in Life (Oxford University Press, 2022) und Autor von Finding Meaning in an Imperfect World (Oxford University Press, 2017) sowie zahlreicher Artikel in Fachzeitschriften.

Veröffentlichungen (Auswahl)

• »Competitive Value, Noncompetitive Value, and Life’s Meaning«, in: Australasian Journal of Philosophy 102 (2024), S. 824-856.
• »Can There Be Overly Meaningful Lives? Conflicts Between Meaning in Life and Other Values«, in: Frontiers in Psychology 13 (2022).
• »Externalism, Internalism, and Meaningful Lives«, in: Ratio 34 (2021), S. 137-146.
• »Two Arguments for the Badness and Meaningless of Life«, in: The Journal of Value Inquiry 54 (2020), S. 429-444.
• Finding Meaning in an Imperfect World, Oxford: Oxford University Press 2017.

Forschungskontext

Iddo Landau ist auf Einladung von Matthias Lutz-Bachmann, dem Direktor des Forschungskollegs Humanwissenschaften und Professor für Philosophie an der Goethe-Universität, Fellow am Forschungskolleg Humanwissenschaften. Sein Aufenthalt wird gefördert durch Forschungsmittel der Universität Haifa.