Abstract
In this comment on Johan Von Essen’s contribution on the meaning of volunteering we make some remarks about Von Essen’s starting point, which reveals a particular perspective on meaningfulness, namely that people perceive reality as meaningful when their actions and the things they encounter are part of a meaningful whole. By introducing another perspective on meaningfulness, namely that the shattering of a meaningful whole is full of meaning, we question if practices of volunteering which occur in face-to-face situations—and thus outside the public realm—can be fully captured by the five predicates that make up the phenomenological structure of volunteering.
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Van Daele, E. Different Perspectives on Meaning and Meaningfulness. Found Sci 21, 335–338 (2016). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10699-014-9393-8
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10699-014-9393-8