I'm looking forward to Peter Kingsley's forthcoming book on Carl Jung and Henry Corbin, Catafalque. 

https://catafalque.org

I would have to say Plato, Nietzsche,  and Rene Guenon.  Although honorable mentions go to Sextus Empiricus, Zhuangzi, and Schopenhauer.

I honestly don't remember if that's different than the first time I answered the question.

RomanJoe wrote:

Perhaps a better way of looking at the threat of non-being is through the lense of ultimate purpose. If there is no ultimate purpose to our lives--and we are merely a transition out of non-being and back to into non-being--can we really say our lives have value beyond that which we subjectively interpret them to? In other words, if mankind never existed in the first place, would it make any real difference in the last analysis, given that mankind is doomed to die along with the universe?

Who would be conducting this "last analysis"?  The question wants to posit an outside observer, like God, from whom value comes.  If God does not exist, this a very peculiar way to think of the question in the first place.  If God does exist, the after life question seems secondary and derivative on the question, "whence value?"

Let's say there is no God or transcendence.  The idea of ultimate purpose would be a fantasy.  At a certain point, one would have to reconcile one's beliefs with reality and stop asking for something which by nature is a chimera.  Just like a man could desire a meal so good he would never be hungry again.  If said desire prevented him from enjoying the actual meals he ate, or worse, made him stop eating, it would be to his benefit to purge that desire from his psyche/mind. 

It's obviously not that simple, given that we don't know God is dead.  So we do have to struggle with the idea of ultimate purpose.

Welcome, 
Feel free to start some threads and ask questions.

DanielCC wrote:

There are two things at work....

2. Politics, politics, politics - the worm which has devoured Man's heart and enslaved his soul. People often display knee-jerk behavioristic reactions to metaphysical questions because of the most contingent parochial Culture WarsTM association.

Speaking of, I ran across this article (http://www.theimaginativeconservative.org/2015/02/camo-and-conversions-the-parallels-between-duck-dynasty-and-dante-culture.html) an hour ago by conservative Rod Dreher that looks at conservative anti-intellectualism.  I think there are differences between the smug atheist provincialism and the simple-country-wisdom act that anti-intellectual conservatives put on, but I don't think they are ultimately different animals.  And I think they both have a lot to do with politics and the culture wars.