What, if anything, makes life meaningful according to African perspectives? In this article, I attempt to answer the question of how characteristically African approaches would define and explain the meaning of life and to pick out the best one. I look at the meaning of life in terms of purpose, value, and coherence of the life as a whole, focusing on the meaning of individual lives, rather than of human life in general. I look at three different African approaches to such meaning of life, namely life, love and destiny. I evaluate the three theories of meaning in terms of their ability to account for intuitions about the meaningfulness of relations, work, self-actualisation, upholding tradition and partaking in rituals. Finally, I show that the destiny view is the most plausible African account of life’s meaning, compared to its two major competitors.

中文翻译：

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非洲人对生活意义的理解

从非洲的角度来看，什么使生活变得有意义？在本文中，我试图回答一个问题，即非洲方法将如何典型地定义和解释生命的意义，并挑选出最佳方法。我从整个生命的目的，价值和连贯性的角度看待生命的意义，重点是个人生活的意义，而不是一般人的生活。我看一下非洲对这种生命意义的三种不同理解方法，即生命，爱与命运。我以意义的三种理论来解释关于关系，工作，自我实现，坚持传统和仪式的意义的直觉的能力。最后，我证明了命运观是非洲对人生意义的最合理的解释，