1. For a wide-ranging discussion of the dimensions of meaningful life that includes a non-denominational treatment of the religious dimension of meaning, see John Cottingham,On the Meaning of Life(London: Routledge, 2003). A critical appraisal of this book is provided by Thaddeus Metz, “Baier and Cottingham on the Meaning of Life,”Disputatio1, 19 (2005), 215–228.
2. My wording here may raise the question whether a language can contain expressions that arenotmeaningful. I want to leave this open. But consider ‘ugh!’ It belongs to English and has afunction;but although it may be used to express disgust, it does notmean, e.g. ‘I'm disgusted by that’. A linguistic item with meaning has a function, but the converse is not true.
3. I take ‘meaningful’ and ‘meaningless’ to be, in the existential cases, contraries rather than contradictories. Some mixed lives may have elements of meaning mixed with vacuous periods in a way that makes neither term applicable (or at least not clearly so—both are of course vague).
4. Rewardingness is not equivalent to pleasure, though what is rewarding is typically enjoyable. I have charactereized the notion in some detail inThe Architecture of Reason(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001), esp. pp. 96–7. Instrumentalists about practical reason might hold a kind of desire-satisfaction view of rewardingness, but in Ch. 5 and (more extensively) in “Prospects for a Naturalization of Practical Reason: Humean Instrumentalism and the Normative Authority of Desire,”International Journal of Philosophical Studies10, 3 (2002), 235–63, I argue that this kind of view cannot account for intrinsic value (of which I take rewardingness to be a kind) or for reasons for action.
5. I leave open here whether the criterion should be taken to provide a necessary condition as well, in part because it would seem that a meaningful life might not be good and the person living it might on that count fail to please God (I here take a criterion, as is not uncommon, to be a consideration that is a basic kind of positive evidence, even if not necessarily by itself a sufficient condition, for what it is a criterion of—it need not be by itself necessary either). I also omit the usual third member of the theistic triad, omnipotence, since it does not figure in the points essential here.