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Fundamental conditions of human existence as the ground of life's meaning: reply to Landau

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  26 June 2014

THADDEUS METZ
THADDEUS METZ*
Affiliation:
Department of Philosophy, B-602 APK, University of Johannesburg, POB 524, Auckland Park, 2006, South Africa e-mail: tmetz@uj.ac.za
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Abstract

Taking the good (generosity), the true (enquiry), and the beautiful (creativity) as exemplars of what can make a life noticeably meaningful, elsewhere I have advanced a principle that entails and plausibly explains all three. Specifically, I have proffered the view that great meaning in life, at least in so far as it comes from this triad, is a matter of positively orienting one's rational nature towards fundamental conditions of human existence, conditions of human life responsible for much else about it. Iddo Landau has raised important objections to this principle, arguing in particular that contouring one's rationality towards fundamentality is neither necessary nor sufficient for great meaning in life. In this article, I reply to Landau's objections to the fundamentality account of what makes life very meaningful. I thereby aim to enrich reflection about what it is about the lives of Nelson Mandela, Mother Teresa, Albert Einstein, and Pablo Picasso that made them so significant as well as to indicate how fundamentality implicitly plays a key role in theistic conceptions of meaning in life.

Type
Articles
Information
Religious Studies , Volume 51 , Issue 1 , March 2015 , pp. 111 - 123
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2014 

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