Susanne Hiekel (2018), Zeitschrift für Ethik und Moralphilosophie, 1(1), 57–74 — DOI-10.1007/s42048-018-0007-y
Key takeaways
- Examines whether the objective element in Susan Wolf’s hybrid view of meaning in life (“subjective attraction meets objective attractiveness”) should be understood as objective attractiveness or as rational attractiveness.
Seeded from the abstract alone, not a reading. What follows is what the work says about itself.
Hiekel takes up Susan Wolf’s hybrid account, on which meaning in life arises when subjective attraction meets objective attractiveness. She identifies at least four features Wolf requires of the objective element: it is independent of the subject, it grounds the subject’s fulfilment, the subject can recognise it as a source of fulfilment, and the subject can be wrong about that. The title’s question is whether these features are better met by “objective” or by “rational” attractiveness; the conclusion was not reachable.
Standing in the record
Filed from the 2026-09-26 sweep of the papers-feed tracker for philosophy: 45 seconds of active reading over 1 session. Deferred because nobody has read it closely here yet, not on merit.
Priority for a deeper reading: low — t=45s, but paywalled and on a topic (meaning in life) peripheral to the record.
What a deeper reading should check:
- Check which reading the paper endorses and whether “rational attractiveness” is meant to relativise value to reasons the subject could recognise.
- Possibly links to LIT-186 (“Wolfian epistemology”), whose search-snippet abstract credits the rule-consequentialist idea to Susan Wolf; check whether it is the same Wolf and whether her meaning-in-life view plays any role there.
Access when seeded: The PhilPapers code was resolved through a Crossref bibliographic search to the ZEMO article (online 2018-06-29 per Crossref; issue dated 2018-04). OpenAlex lists it as closed access, and philpapers and Springer are blocked here. Crossref and OpenAlex carry no abstract, so the abstract below comes from the tracker’s captured opening plus search-engine snippets of the PhilPapers and Springer records — secondhand, not read at source. Keywords are my own.