The good, the true, and the beautiful
Toward a Unified Account of Great Meaning in Life
Bibliographic Data
| ID | 8072056 |
|---|---|
| Authors | Thaddeus Metz (0000-0001-9861-2408, corresponding author) |
| Year | 2010 |
| Volume | 47 |
| Issue | 4 |
| Pages | 389-409 |
| Publication date | 2010-11-08 |
| Peer Reviewed | Yes |
| Open Access | Yes |
| Type | ARTICLE |
| Venue | Religious Studies (JOURNAL) |
| Journal identifiers | ISSN: 0034-4125 • E-ISSN: 1469-901X |
| Publisher | Cambridge University Press (CUP) (PUBLISHER) |
| DOI | 10.1017/s0034412510000569 |
| OpenAlex | W2055114222 |
| Language | EN |
| Citations received | 15 |
| References cited | 4 |
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
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Conceptualizing great meaning in life
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Meaning in Life as the Comprehensive Value. Towards a Better Understanding of the Relationship Between Meaningfulness and Morality
Expectable Outcome Deontology – A New Theory of Life’s Meaning
Gross National Happiness
What if God was all of us? Why the definition of ‘God’ matters in analytic discussions of meaning in life
Meaning in the Lives of Children
Recent Work on the Meaning of Life and Philosophy of Religion
| Unique citing works | 15 |
|---|---|
| Citations per year | 1,15 |
| Citation span | 2013 - 2026 (14) |
| Citation velocity | current |
| Highly cited | No |
| Citation types | Neutral: 14 |