Abstract

Robert Shope states at the outset of The Nature of Meaningfulness that his goal is "to present a unified view of meaningfulness". As the book unfolds, the unity in his view turns out to be subtle and complex, and to take in many distinct topics. His discussion is dense with arguments and counterexamples, and engages with many other contemporary analytic philosophers' writings on each topic. Readers are justified, I think, in treating the book as a collection of quite independent essays on various metaphysical topics that can profitably be engaged selectively on the basis of a reader's interests and on the reader's methodological terms.