In the growing literature on meaning in/of life, not a lot has been done to address the question of the meaning of/in life from an African perspective. Thus, in this article I attempt to bridge this intellectual gap by taxonomising and justifying some plausible theories of meaning in African thought in more depth than is found in African philosophical literature. Achieving this would involve proffering answers to the question: what are the African conceptions of the meaning in/of life? To do this, I first distinguish between meaning in life, which involves those moments of meaningfulness that may dot a person’s existence, and the meaning of life, which involves the meaningfulness of a person’s life considered as a whole. From clues in the literature, I curate four salient accounts of meaningfulness, viz. the African God-purpose theory of meaning, the vital-force theory of meaning, the communal normative function theory of meaning, and the consolationist theory of meaning.

中文翻译：

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对非洲生命意义概念的系统描述

在越来越多的关于生命意义的文献中，从非洲的角度来解决生命意义的问题还没有做很多。因此，在本文中，我试图通过对非洲思想中的一些合理的意义理论进行分类和论证，以弥合这种智力鸿沟，其深度超过了非洲哲学文献中的发现。要做到这一点，将需要提供以下问题的答案：非洲对生命意义的概念是什么？为此，我首先要区分生命的意义和生命的意义，生命的意义涉及可能影响一个人存在的有意义的时刻，生命的意义涉及一个人的生活的整体意义。从文献的线索中，我策划了四个有意义的重要说明，即。非洲上帝的意义理论