Mortality Matters: Meaning & Death

Matthew Jernberg
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Mortality Matters: Meaning & Death

A philosopher teaches research into a microphone on the meaning of life and the philosophy of death. Each episode focuses on one article or book chapter from either of these fields of academic philosophy. Emphasis is placed upon making the material accessible to the public and not just for specialists. If you wonder whether we should fear death or what it even means for life to be meaningful, this podcast may be of some interest to you.

Episodes

  1. 04/24/2023

    #12 – Are Near-Death Experiences Evidence of an Afterlife? Fischer on the significance of near-death experience.

    Send us a textWould it be a letdown if you discovered that your near-death experience of an Afterlife turned out to just be a dream? That what you took to be an Afterlife isn't real and that the experience was something like a hallucination? You might be surprised to learn that Fischer argues that the unreality of the Afterlife in no way diminishes the significance of near-death experiences for those who are sincere about them. He argues that near-death experiences can provide us with emotion...

    30 min

  2. 04/09/2023

    #11 – Are Near-Death Experiences Evidence of an Afterlife? Fischer against near-death experiences.

    Send us a textAre near-death experiences evidence of an afterlife? What are we such that an afterlife could be possible for beings like us at all? In this episode, I discuss Fischer's criticisms of the evidentiary role near-death experiences have for belief in an afterlife. While he doesn't deny that they are experienced, Fischer likens near-death experiences to dreams and would only constitute evidence of an afterlife if there were something supernatural about the mind, namely, that the mind...

    43 min

  3. 03/28/2023

    #10 – Would heaven be worse than oblivion? Fischer on the afterlife.

    Send us a textIn this episode, I focus on the second half of Fischer's response to Williams' pessimistic criticisms of immortality in which he concentrates on supernatural conceptions of the afterlife. I first consider whether the afterlife is even possible for beings like us. Notably, any who believe that there is an afterlife (whether that be good or bad) must also think that death is a transition of some sort, typically a separation of soul from body, and that the transmigration into heave...

    57 min

  4. 03/20/2023

    #9 – Must immortality be boring? Fischer on why immortality wouldn't be so bad.

    Send us a textWould immortality be a curse of eternal boredom, were it even possible? If so, then you might think that we're better off as mortals and that death is a blessing of a kind that prevents us from being depleted of whatever makes life worth living, as it will eventually run out. Fischer rejects this line of thinking, arguing instead that not only is death unnecessary for life to be meaningful but that immortality would be no worse or much different from mortality. Specifically, he ...

    54 min

  5. 03/13/2023

    #8 – Is immortality even worth wanting? Fischer on whether immortals would be recognizable.

    Send us a textYou might think that death is part of our nature or that mortality is essential to our nature as human beings. If so, then immortal beings would be radically different than us, so different in fact that they would not be recognizable as beings like us. So if you were offered a Faustian bargain to trade your humanity for the promise and reality of immortality, it wouldn't be worthwhile. In this episode, I discuss Fischer's defense that immortality is worthwhile against a bat...

    48 min

  6. 03/06/2023

    #7 – What does it mean to be immortal? Fischer on the nature of immortality.

    Send us a textIn this episode, I discuss what Fischer means by 'immortality.' At this point in his book, he has taken himself to have established that death does harm the one who dies, even if the details about when or how it is harmful aren't fully worked out. It is natural then to consider an objection: if all else being equal it is always bad to die, it would then be best to live forever, yet living forever is bad for this immortal, so death must at some point not be so bad. This is why I ...

    40 min

  7. 02/27/2023

    #6 – How should we feel about death? Fischer on the symmetry of our post-mortem & pre-natal condition.

    Send us a textIn this episode, I consider how we should feel about our own death given how we tend to be indifferent about when we came into existence. Lucretius takes this indifference as a reason to likewise feel indifferent about our own deaths, as our future post-mortem condition is a mirror image of our past pre-natal condition. This is called the "Symmetry Argument," of which Fischer identifies two formulations that turn out to be problematic. I reformulate both versions multiple times ...

    52 min

  8. 02/23/2023

    #5 – When is death harmful? Fischer on the timing of mortal harm.

    Send us a textIn this episode, from the first part of chapter 4 of John Martin Fischer's book, "Death, Immortality, and Meaning in Life," I cover and evaluate multiple responses to two Epicurean arguments that death cannot harm the one who dies: the Timing Argument, that there is no time at which death is harmful, and the No Subject Argument, that there is no one who can be harmed by death. I follow Ben Bradley in organizing the range of theories on the timing of mortal harm as responses to T...

    46 min

  9. 02/06/2023

    #4 – Must harms be experienced to be harmful? Fischer on unexperienced harm.

    Send us a textIn this episode, I evaluate Fischer's argument that being betrayed secretly by one's friends and family would be harmful even if one were to never directly or indirectly experience anything from it. I consider two lives, one with a secret betrayal and another without it, though otherwise qualitatively identical. Fischer doesn't specify exactly why secret betrayals are harmful other than that they would set our interests back, so our intuitions that they are may be based in a con...

    28 min

  10. 01/24/2023

    #3 – Can death be harmful? Fischer against Epicureanism.

    Send us a textIn this episode, I consider some initial objections against Fischer's view that death can harm the one who dies: that death cannot be experienced as a harm, that it has no time at which it is harmful, and that we have no more reason to fear an early death than we have do regret a late birth. Absent a successful defense to each of these challenges, Fischer would have to concede the argument to Epicurus and his followers, who contend that death is harmless. Lastly, I consider the ...

    20 min

  11. 01/16/2023

    #2 – What is death? Fischer on death.

    Send us a textIn this episode, I discuss what death is, arguing that it is the cessation of one's existence and not necessarily one's life, I discuss the difference between death, dying and the condition of being a corpse, whether death must be permanent, whether one can have an exit from life without dying, and what implications gappy existence has for a proper definition of death.

    59 min

  12. 01/09/2023

    #1 – What is the meaning of life? Fischer on meaning in life.

    Send us a textIn this episode, I discuss the relationship between meaning in life and goodness, arguing that meaning just is goodness, I discuss variants of Nozick's Experience Machine, and the proper perspective by which to evaluate whether our lives are meaningful.

    49 min
  • 12 Episodes

About

A philosopher teaches research into a microphone on the meaning of life and the philosophy of death. Each episode focuses on one article or book chapter from either of these fields of academic philosophy. Emphasis is placed upon making the material accessible to the public and not just for specialists. If you wonder whether we should fear death or what it even means for life to be meaningful, this podcast may be of some interest to you.

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