Einleitung: Das Schöne, Wahre und Gute – Das sinnvolle Leben in der Diskussion

Abstract

The category of meaning or meaningfulness recently has received widespread attention within the debate on the good life. Indeed, many authors suppose that any comprehensive normative theory of the good life needs to include an account of the meaningful life, understood as one of its particular value dimensions. Usually, this syntagma is understood in terms of referring to a certain valuable aspect of a 42 Einleitung: Das Schöne, Wahre und Gute given life or one of its temporal parts, labelled as praiseworthy, significant, or admirable. Controversy abounds, however, when it comes to questions such as whether the meaningful life constitutes an independent value category within the good life, or, if so, how this category relates to the other, more established categories of the good life like human well-being. The articles collected in this special issue attempt to contribute to the controversies on the understanding of the multi-layered dimension of the meaningful life and try to shed further light on it.