The good, the true, and the beautiful

Toward a Unified Account of Great Meaning in Life

Dados Bibliográficos

ID8072056
AutoresThaddeus Metz (0000-0001-9861-2408, autor correspondente)
Ano2010
Volume47
Fascículo4
Páginas389-409
Data de publicação2010-11-08
Peer ReviewedSim
Open AccessSim
TipoARTICLE
PeriódicoReligious Studies (JOURNAL)
Identificadores do periódicoISSN: 0034-4125 • E-ISSN: 1469-901X
EditoraCambridge University Press (CUP) (PUBLISHER)
DOI10.1017/s0034412510000569
OpenAlexW2055114222
IdiomaEN
Citações recebidas15
Referências citadas4

Three of the great sources of meaning in life are the good, the true, and the beautiful, and I aim to make headway on the grand Enlightenment project of ascertaining what, if anything, they have in common. Concretely, if we take a (stereotypical) Mother Teresa, Mandela, Darwin, Einstein, Dostoyevsky, and Picasso, what might they share that makes it apt to deem their lives to have truly mattered? I provide reason to doubt two influential answers, noting a common flaw that supernaturalism and consequentialism share. I instead develop their most plausible rival, a naturalist and non-consequentialist account of what enables moral achievement, intellectual reflection, and aesthetic creation to confer great meaning on a person's life, namely, the idea that they do so insofar as a person transcends an aspect of herself in some substantial way. I criticize several self-transcendence theories that contemporary philosophers have advanced, before presenting a new self-transcendence view and defending it as the most promising

Aesthetics · Constructive · Enlightenment · Epistemology · Meaning (existential · Naturalism · Transcendence (philosophy · Ethics in medical practice · Neuroethics, Human Enhancement, Biomedical Innovations · Philosophical Ethics and Theory · Philosophy