There is a story, probably apocryphal, of an anecdote told by a taxi-driver: “I had that Bertrand Russell in the back of my cab once. So I said to him, All right Lord Russell – what's life all about then? And you know what? He couldn't tell me!”

How should philosophers approach the problem of the meaning of life without embarrassment? Although it is the sort of question that often gets people interested in philosophy, some professional philosophers groan inwardly when the subject is raised. At one time it was common to dismiss the question as being itself meaningless, and the asking of it as showing a naive misconception of what philosophy is about. If you must ask such questions, philosophers would say, don't ask us – try another shop. All philosophers can do, if they think it worth the while, is disentangle the confusions in the question. This sort of reaction especially characterized the heyday of logical positivism and linguistic analysis, around the middle of the twentieth century. Neither reflection on logical truths, nor the analysis of ordinary language, nor any empirical test, could answer questions of this kind.

These philosophical theories are not much considered nowadays, except as part of the recent history of philosophy. But the general mindset was part of an empiricist way of thinking that is alive and well. It has significant strengths, in that it stresses the importance of clarity and precision, and discourages grand-sounding verbiage, the sort of thing the Enlightenment thinker David Hume considered to be “sophistry and illusion”! Yet questions about the meaning of life will not simply go away.