Alex
Administrator
great let's get him on. would you mind reaching out. let me know if you'd like me to help.I have been really interested in David Chapman's material on his meaningness.com website. I don't think he considers himself a humanist, per se. He's into a few very specific ideas that can be found in specific Buddhist traditions as well as in some Western thinkers. PhD from MIT, I believe, and a former AI researcher who realized at some point a few decades ago that hard AI wasn't going to pan out. He is not sympathetic to folks who pursue "eternalist" perspectives, which would include most spiritual folks. He has done podcasts. I would love for him to have a venue where he could really lay out his position that attempts to situate itself between nihilism and eternalism. He has yet to do a great job of really laying it out on his site.
This page kinda gives some hints as to what he's trying to say about meaningness. There's a lot of material on his various websites; I wish he would make a good effort to summarize his main points in one place:
https://meaningness.com/objective-subjective
His reading list is interesting and you can kinda get a sense of some his general ideas from this page:
https://meaningness.com/further-reading
Kind of a wild-card, but Sabio Lantz is another guy that I found through Chapman. Not sure if he does podcasts, but I believe he has advanced degrees in religion/philosophy and also now is a physician. I believe he is an atheist, though he talks about inexplicable spiritual experiences on his site. My sense is he would be much less combative than Chapman. He seems to be a gentle soul, but very smart, I think. I don't think he has the "professional" cred or big presence that Chapman does, and I don't read his site regularly, so take with grain of salt:
https://triangulations.wordpress.com/2011/09/03/6507/
There's an interesting illustration there -- the stuff in red is to be avoided: note "Grim Hyper-rationalism" as an approach to avoid. These guys understand the problem of "biological robot in a meaningless universe" though I'm not sure how convincing or satisfying their approaches to having meaning would be.
There are a couple guys over at the Spiritual Naturalism Society. This link shows several of humanists:
https://www.snsociety.org/sn-today/
Daniel Strain is the head of the SNS, I believe, and B. T. Newberg teaches a class. I interacted with them a bit several years ago. This is humanism through and through. For me, their perspectives just weren't powerful enough or weird enough; they seemed too close to nihilism for me. I would say they are much closer to "warmed over biological robots/meaningless universe" than Chapman or possibly Lantz.