A comprehensive journey through the history of "meaning," from antiquity to modern day.

The word meaning appears often in our daily lives: religious leaders holding out the promise of meaning for their followers, self-help manuals seeking to demonstrate the power of meaning to enrich our lives, and most frequently people questioning the meaning of life. The word carries a multitude of connotations, from "purpose" to "value" and "essence" to "mysterious truth", but this diversity of understanding is rarely explored.

In "What Do We Mean When We Talk About Meaning?" Steven Cassedy tells the story of how a word that began by denoting "signifying" and "intending" came to acquire such a broad array of sub-definitions. The book begins with the early Christian thinkers who believed meaning could be "read" from the world as if it were holy scripture, then moves into the philosophers who adapted this notion and eventually the Romantic-era Germans that coined "the meaning of life," a phrase that later traveled to Great Britain, the United States, and Russia. The book also extends into the twentieth century, when "meaning" acquired its greatest power in the realms of religion, psychotherapy, and self-help, all of which helped it to accumulate the fluidity and ambiguity it still displays today.

"Most people want to lead meaningful lives — but what does the word 'meaning' really mean? In What Do We Mean When We Talk About Meaning?, Steven Cassedy gives readers a fascinating history of 'meaning,' tracing how it transformed from an ordinary word in the Middle Ages into the existentially weighty concept it is today. This erudite book reminds us that meaning is a fluid and mysterious concept — but one that holds great power and promise." - Emily Esfahani Smith, Author of The Power of Meaning

"A stimulating compound of wide-ranging intellectual history and striking linguistic erudition providing many new insights into its important subject." - Jerrold Seigel, Professor Emeritus, New York University

"How did the words 'meaning' and 'life' become connected? Steven Cassedy's remarkable intellectual history provides the first comprehensive answer, by tracing the connection from the ancient world, to German Romanticism, to the Catholic Church's adoption of the language of 'meaning' in the 1960s. It's quite a story, very irreverently told, and once you know it you might not want a meaningful life anymore." - James Tartaglia, Professor of Metaphysical Philosophy, Keele University

Steven Cassedy is the author of six previous books, including To the Other Shore: The Russian Jewish Intellectuals Who Came to America (Princeton, 1997), Dostoevsky's Religion (Stanford, 2005), and Connected: How Trains, Genes, Pineapples, Piano Keys, and a Few Disasters Transformed Americans at the Dawn of the Twentieth Century (Stanford, 2014), which won a gold medal in US history at the Independent Publisher Book Awards (IPPY). He retired as a Distinguished Professor of Literature and Associate Dean of the Graduate Division at the University of California, San Diego, in 2018 and now lives with his wife Patrice, a playwright, in Riverdale, Bronx.