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Introduction. Meaningfulness, Volunteers, Citizenship

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Abstract

This introductory article starts by describing the genesis of this special issue and the interconnection of its topics. The editors offer a variety of reading entries into the key-note articles and responses. The article reconstructs the research interests underpinning the idea of integrating meaningfulness, volunteers and citizenship. It highlights the explicit interdisciplinary design of the special issue, and shows how the key-note authors, and their respondents, weave connections between meaningfulness, volunteering and citizenship. And, finally, the editors bring the background understandings of the key-note papers to the foreground, and reconstruct a non-intentional meta-level discussion on two fundamental concepts and their interplay: self and world.

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Notes

  1. For a more ethically embedded biographical model of meaningfulness, see Taylor (1989, 1991).

  2. This transformative model of meaningfulness is inspired by the work of Levinas (1971) and Arendt (1957), but is also closely connected to similar thoughts on ethics and meaningfulness in the work of Gaita (2006) and Burms (2011).

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Acknowledgments

We wish to express our gratitude to those who have helped to bring this project to fruition, and more in particular to all the contributors to this volume, the participants of the workshop on Volunteers, Citizenship, Meaningfulness held at Odisee, University College (September 2012), at which drafts of most of the papers published in this volume were presented and discussed. The responses to these papers by the various commentators have deepened the on diverse issues. We are also indebted to the Research Community ‘Research on the construction of integrated worldviews’, Research Foundation Flanders (FWO); the Center Leo Apostel for Interdisciplinary Studies (CLEA), Vrije Universiteit Brussel (VUB); and the School of Social Work of Odisee, University College, for their financial support.

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Correspondence to Erik Claes.

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Claes, E., Note, N. Introduction. Meaningfulness, Volunteers, Citizenship. Found Sci 21, 237–251 (2016). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10699-014-9383-x

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