Abstract
D.Litt. et Phil. (Philosophy)
Though for a large portion of the twentieth century the question of life’s meaning wasn’t a favorite question among analytic philosophers, recent developments, especially within the last 30 years, show that the meaning of life is no longer ‘the black sheep of normative family’ (Metz 2002: 811). As Thaddeus Metz and others have already noted, most normative philosophers had been more comfortable discussing notions such as ‘happiness’, ‘well-being’ and ‘value’ and, thus, the notion of ‘meaningfulness’ has not been considered as a distinguished category that could account for a good life (cf. Wolf 2010, Metz 2013). However, there is enough evidence to suggest that the question of life’s meaning ‘has come firmly back onto the philosophical agenda’ (Cottingham 2013: 115). Long has passed since the day a distinguished analytic philosopher announced in his presidential address to the American Philosophical Association that ‘once in a time of weakness and lapse of judgment he wrote a paper on the meaning of life’ (Adams 2002: 71). In fact, the very existence of a growing body of literature on the meaning of life shows that ‘the problem does not go away’ (Cottingham 2003: 2) and one is bound to enquire about the ‘problem’ somewhere in one’s life.