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  1. The Concept of Life's Meaning.Thaddeus Metz - 2022 - In Iddo Landau (ed.), The Oxford Handbook of Meaning in Life. New York: Oxford University Press. pp. 27-42.
    I critically discuss views about what at least analytic philosophers have in mind when reflecting on what makes life meaningful. I first demonstrate that there has been a standard view of that, according to which meaningfulness centrally involves the actions of human persons, ones that exhibit a high desirability characteristically present in ‘the good, the true, and the beautiful’ and absent from the cases of Sisyphus or the Experience Machine. Then, I address five challenges to the standard view that have (...)
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  • Value, Respect, and Attachment.Joseph Raz - 2001 - New York: Cambridge University Press.
    The book is a contribution to the study of values, as they affect both our personal and our public life. It defends the view that values are necessarily universal, on the ground that that is a condition of their intelligibility. It does, however, reject most common conceptions of universality, like those embodied in the writings on human rights. It aims to reconcile the universality of value with the social dependence of value and the centrality to our life of deep attachments (...)
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  • Meaning in Life and Why It Matters.Susan Wolf - 2010 - Princeton University Press.
    Most people, including philosophers, tend to classify human motives as falling into one of two categories: the egoistic or the altruistic, the self-interested or the moral. According to Susan Wolf, however, much of what motivates us does not comfortably fit into this scheme. Often we act neither for our own sake nor out of duty or an impersonal concern for the world. Rather, we act out of love for objects that we rightly perceive as worthy of love--and it is these (...)
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  • Engaging Reason.Joseph Raz - 1999 - Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 66 (3):745-748.
    Joseph Raz presents a penetrating exploration of the interdependence of value, reason, and the will. These essays illuminate a wide range of questions concerning fundamental aspects of human thought and action. Engaging Reason is a summation of many years of original, compelling, and influential work by a major contemporary philosopher.
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  • Meaning in Life: Meeting the Challenges.Susan Wolf - 2016 - Foundations of Science 21 (2):279-282.
    Responding to comments by Cheshire Calhoun and Arnold Burms, this piece clarifies some of Wolf’s ideas about the relation between meaningfulness in life, on the one hand, and reasons of love, fulfillment, and objective value, on the other. Meaning tends to come from activities whose reasons are grounded in love of a worthy object, and not necessarily from reasons having anything to do with an interest in meaningfulness itself. But what counts as a worthy object cannot be determined either from (...)
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  • Meaningfulness: A Third Dimension of the Good Life.Susan Wolf - 2016 - Foundations of Science 21 (2):253-269.
    This paper argues that an adequate conception of a good life should recognize, in addition to happiness and morality, a third dimension of meaningfulness. It further proposes that we understand meaningfulness as involving both a subjective and an objective condition, suitably linked. Meaning arises when subjective attraction meets objective attractiveness. In other words one’s life is meaningful insofar as one is gripped or excited by things worthy of one’s love, and one is able to do something positive about it. The (...)
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  • Meaning in Life.Thaddeus Metz - 2017 - In Benjamin Matheson & Yujin Nagasawa (eds.), The Palgrave Handbook of the Afterlife. London: Palgrave Macmillan. pp. 353-370.
    This chapter critically explores contemporary philosophical understandings of whether meaning in life might depend on the presence or absence of an afterlife. After distinguishing various kinds of afterlife, it focuses most on the potential relevance of an eternal one, and considers at length the extreme but common views amongst philosophers that an eternal afterlife would be either necessary for a meaningful life or, conversely, sufficient for a meaningless one. It concludes by considering the plausibility of a more moderate view, that (...)
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  • The Concept of a Meaningful Life.Thaddeus Metz - 2001 - American Philosophical Quarterly 38 (2):137-153.
    This paper aims to clarify what we are asking when posing the question of what (if anything) makes a life meaningful. People associate many different ideas with talk of "meaning in life," so that one must search for an account of the question that is primary in some way. Therefore, after briefly sketching the major conceptions of life's meaning in 20th century philosophical literature, the remainder of the paper systematically seeks a satisfactory analysis the concept of a meaningful life that (...)
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  • Happiness and Meaning: Two Aspects of the Good Life.Susan Wolf - 1997 - Social Philosophy and Policy 14 (1):207.
    The topic of self-interest raises large and intractable philosophical questions–most obviously, the question “In what does self-interest consist?” The concept, as opposed to the content of self-interest, however, seems clear enough. Self-interest is interest in one's own good. To act self-interestedly is to act on the motive of advancing one's own good. Whether what one does actually is in one's self-interest depends on whether it actually does advance, or at least, minimize the decline of, one's own good. Though it may (...)
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  • Intrinsic value and meaningful life.Robert Audi - 2005 - Philosophical Papers 34 (3):331-355.
    Abstract I distinguish various ways in which human life may be thought to be meaningful and present an account of what might be called existential meaningfulness. The account is neutral with respect to both theism and naturalism, but each is addressed in several places and the paper's main points are harmonious with certain versions of both. A number of important criteria for existential meaningfulness are examined, and special emphasis is placed on criteria centering on creativity and excellence, on contributing to (...)
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  • The Variety of Values: Essays on Morality, Meaning, and Love.Susan R. Wolf - 2014 - New York: Oxford University Press.
    For over thirty years Susan Wolf has been writing about moral and nonmoral values and the relation between them. This volume collects Wolf's most important essays on the topics of morality, love, and meaning, ranging from her classic essay "Moral Saints" to her most recent "The Importance of Love.".
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  • Reasons of Love: Response to Wolf.Cheshire Calhoun - 2016 - Foundations of Science 21 (2):275-277.
    According to Wolf’s fitting fulfillment view, meaningfulness depends on the person’s subjective attraction to an activity being grounded in ‘reasons of love’ that concern the objective value of those activities. In this short comment, I argue that ‘reasons of love’—and thus reasons for regarding as meaningful—are not limited to those having to do with the objective value of activities and relationships, but include also what I call ‘reasons for the initiated’ and ‘reasons for me’.
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  • The role of well‐being.Joseph Raz - 2004 - Philosophical Perspectives 18 (1):269–294.
    "Well-being" signifies the good life, the life which is good for the person whose life it is. I have argued that well-being consists in a wholehearted and successful pursuit of valuable relationships and goals. This view, a little modified, is defended , but the main aim of the article is to consider the role of well-being in practical thought. In particular I will examine a suggestion which says that when we care about people, and when we ought to care about (...)
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  • Value, Respect and Attachment.Joseph Raz - 2003 - Philosophy 78 (305):430-432.
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  • Meaning in Life and Why It Matters (Markus Rüther).Susan Wolf - 2011 - Philosophischer Literaturanzeiger 64 (3):308.
    Most people, including philosophers, tend to classify human motives as falling into one of two categories: the egoistic or the altruistic, the self-interested or the moral. According to Susan Wolf, however, much of what motivates us does not comfortably fit into this scheme. Often we act neither for our own sake nor out of duty or an impersonal concern for the world. Rather, we act out of love for objects that we rightly perceive as worthy of love--and it is these (...)
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  • Meaning and morality.Susan Wolf - 1997 - Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society 97 (3):299–315.
    Susan Wolf; XV*—Meaning and Morality1, Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, Volume 97, Issue 1, 1 June 1997, Pages 299–316, https://doi.org/10.1111/1467-926.
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  • Nikomachische Ethik. Aristoteles, Olof Gigon & Karl Hoen - 1953 - Tijdschrift Voor Filosofie 15 (2):319-321.
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  • Questions about the Meaning of Life: R. W. HEPBURN.R. W. Hepburn - 1966 - Religious Studies 1 (2):125-140.
    Claims about ‘the meaning of life’ have tended to be made and discussed in conjunction with bold metaphysical and theological affirmations. For life to have meaning, there must be a comprehensive divine plan to give it meaning, or there must be an intelligible cosmic process with a ‘telos’ that a man needs to know if his life is to be meaningfully orientated. Or, it is thought to be a condition of the meaningfulness of life, that values should be ultimately ‘conserved’ (...)
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  • Das Sinnvolle und das Lebenswerte: Zur Klärung ihrer Gemeinsamkeiten und Unterschiede.Thaddeus Metz - 2013 - In Matthias Hoesch, Sebastian Muders & Markus Rüther (eds.), Glück - Werte - Sinn: Metaethische, ethische und theologische Zugänge zur Frage nach dem guten Leben. Boston: Walter de Gruyter. pp. 109-25.
    'The Meaningful and the Worthwhile' (Philosophical Forum 2012) translated into German by Markus Rüther.
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