Iddo Landau Professor of Philosophy, University of Haifa Resident at the Forschungskolleg Humanwissenschaften: October 2025 – July 2026 Research topic at the Forschungskolleg Humanwissenschaften: »Pessimism, Optimism, and the Meaning of Life« Project outline: My project suggests a comprehensive atheist defense of optimism regarding life’s goodness and meaningfulness. The position advocated is philosophically moderate: it does not claim that all lives are good but rather that for many people life is overall more good than bad and that for many others it could become so. Further, I argue that contrary to modern anti-natalistic claims, for many individuals it is better to have come to existence rather than never to have come to existence at all. The project also argues that, overall, human life has greatly improved rather than deteriorated in recent centuries and decades—and may well continue to do so. In arguing for these claims the project critically engages with various forms of philosophical and political pessimism, from classical to contemporary ones. (Iddo Landau) Research partner: Iddo Landau is a fellow at the Forschungskolleg Humanwissenschaften at the invitation of Matthias Lutz-Bachmann, the Director of the Forschungskolleg Humanwissenschaften and Professor of philosophy at Goethe University. His stay is funded by research funds of the University of Haifa. Scholarly profile of Iddo LandauIddo Landau is a Professor of Philosophy at the University of Haifa, Israel. He specializes in the philosophy of meaning in life and in the optimism/pessimism debate. He is editor of The Oxford Handbook of Meaning in Life (Oxford University Press, 2022) and is author of Finding Meaning in an Imperfect World (Oxford University Press, 2017) as well as of many articles in peer-reviewed journals. In his work, he argues that life can be good and meaningful, that for many individuals it is so, that neither God nor religion is required for living a good and meaningful life, and that perfectionism often undermines life’s goodness and meaning.Website: Selected publications:
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