Episode description

John Martin Fischer’s Death, Immortality, and Meaning in Lifeoffers a brief yet in-depth introduction to the key philosophical issues and problems concerning death and immortality. In this wide-ranging and thoughtful conversation, Shermer and Fisher discuss:

• meaning in life
• meaning in death
• the badness of death
• different philosophical, religious, and scientific ideas on immortality
• near-death experiences
• extending life through medical technology
• medical immortality vs. real immortality
• the problem of identity for immortality (who or what becomes immortal?)
• living for 100 years vs. 1000 years vs. forever
• responding to the theistic argument that without God anything goes, there is no objective morality, and no meaning to life
• If you don’t believe in God or the afterlife, what do you say to someone who is dying or has lost a loved one?
• Is immortality, like existence, one thought too many?

John Martin Fischer is Distinguished Professor of Philosophy at the University of California, Riverside, and a University Professor at the University of California. He is coauthor of Near-Death Experiences: Understanding Visions of the Afterlife (OUP, 2016), and coeditor of Introduction to Philosophy: Classical and Contemporary Readings(Eighth Edition, OUP, 2018). He was Project Leader of The Immortality Project (John Templeton Foundation).

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