Introduction

Abstract

Though for a large portion of the 20th century the question of life’s meaning wasn’t a favourite question among analytic philosophers, recent developments, especially in the last 40 years, show that the meaning of life is no longer ‘the black sheep of the normative family’ (Metz 2002: 811). As Thaddeus Metz and others have noted, most normative philosophers had been more comfortable discussing notions such as ‘happiness’, ‘well-being’, ‘morality’ and ‘value’, and the notion of ‘meaningfulness’ has not been considered as a distinct category that could account for a good life.¹ However, it seems safe to say that the question of life’s meaning ‘has come firmly back onto the philosophical agenda’ (Cottingham 2012: 115). Gone are the days when a distinguished analytic philosopher announced in his presidential address to the American Philosophical Association that ‘once in a time of weakness and lapse of judgement’ he wrote a paper on the meaning of life (Adams 2002: 71). 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).