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  1. Death, Immortality, and Meaning in Life.John Martin Fischer - 2019 - New York: Oxford University Press.
    "There are seven chapters, addressing philosophical issues pertaining to death, the badness of death, time and death, ideas on immortality, near death experiences, and extending life through medical technology. The book is shorter, and less elaborate, than Kagan's Death. And it goes into more depth about a selection of central issues related to death and immortality than May's book. It gives an original take on various basic puzzles pertaining to death, and integrates a discussion of these philosophical issues with an (...)
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  • Objectivity and Truth: You’d Better Rethink It.Sharon Street - 2016 - Oxford Studies in Metaethics 11.
    This chapter accepts for the sake of argument Ronald Dworkin’s point that the only viable form of normative skepticism is internal, and develops an internal skeptical argument directed specifically at normative realism. There is a striking and puzzling coincidence between normative judgments that are true, and normative judgments that causal forces led us to believe—a practical/theoretical puzzle to which the constructivist view has a solution. Normative realists have no solution, but are driven to conclude that we are probably hopeless at (...)
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  • Hedonic and Non-Hedonic Bias toward the Future.Preston Greene, Andrew J. Latham, Kristie Miller & James Norton - 2021 - Australasian Journal of Philosophy 99 (1):148-163.
    It has widely been assumed, by philosophers, that our first-person preferences regarding pleasurable and painful experiences exhibit a bias toward the future (positive and negative hedonic future-bias), and that our preferences regarding non-hedonic events (both positive and negative) exhibit no such bias (non-hedonic time-neutrality). Further, it has been assumed that our third-person preferences are always time-neutral. Some have attempted to use these (presumed) differential patterns of future-bias—different across kinds of events and perspectives—to argue for the irrationality of hedonic future-bias. This (...)
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  • A dilemma for Epicureanism.Travis Timmerman - 2019 - Philosophical Studies 176 (1):241-257.
    Perhaps death’s badness is an illusion. Epicureans think so and argue that agents cannot be harmed by death when they’re alive nor when they’re dead. I argue that each version of Epicureanism faces a fatal dilemma: it is either committed to a demonstrably false view about the relationship between self-regarding reasons and well-being or it is involved in a merely verbal dispute with deprivationism. I first provide principled reason to think that any viable view about the badness of death must (...)
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  • Lopsided Lives.Theron Pummer - 2011 - In Mark Timmons (ed.), Oxford Studies in Normative Ethics. New York: Oxford University Press. pp. 275-296.
    Intuitively there are many different things that non-derivatively contribute to well-being: pleasure, desire satisfaction, knowledge, friendship, love, rationality, freedom, moral virtue, and appreciation of true beauty. According to pluralism, at least two different types of things non-derivatively contribute to well-being. Lopsided lives score very low in terms of some types of things that putatively non-derivatively contribute to well-being, but very high in terms of other such types of things. I argue that pluralists essentially face a trilemma about lopsided lives: they (...)
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  • Why We Should Reject S.Derek Parfit - 1984 - In Reasons and Persons. Oxford, GB: Oxford University Press.
    An argument against the bias towards the near; how a defence of temporal neutrality is not a defence of S; an appeal to inconsistency; why we should reject S and accept CP.
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  • Meaning in Life and Why It Matters.Susan Wolf - 2010 - Princeton University Press.
    Most people, including philosophers, tend to classify human motives as falling into one of two categories: the egoistic or the altruistic, the self-interested or the moral. According to Susan Wolf, however, much of what motivates us does not comfortably fit into this scheme. Often we act neither for our own sake nor out of duty or an impersonal concern for the world. Rather, we act out of love for objects that we rightly perceive as worthy of love--and it is these (...)
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  • The Evolution of Morality.Richard Joyce - 2005 - Bradford.
    Moral thinking pervades our practical lives, but where did this way of thinking come from, and what purpose does it serve? Is it to be explained by environmental pressures on our ancestors a million years ago, or is it a cultural invention of more recent origin? In The Evolution of Morality, Richard Joyce takes up these controversial questions, finding that the evidence supports an innate basis to human morality. As a moral philosopher, Joyce is interested in whether any implications follow (...)
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  • The Myth of Morality.Richard Joyce - 2001 - New York: Cambridge University Press.
    In The Myth of Morality, Richard Joyce argues that moral discourse is hopelessly flawed. At the heart of ordinary moral judgements is a notion of moral inescapability, or practical authority, which, upon investigation, cannot be reasonably defended. Joyce argues that natural selection is to blame, in that it has provided us with a tendency to invest the world with values that it does not contain, and demands that it does not make. Should we therefore do away with morality, as we (...)
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  • Anti-Meaning and Why It Matters.Stephen M. Campbell & Sven Nyholm - 2015 - Journal of the American Philosophical Association 1 (4): 694-711.
    It is widely recognized that lives and activities can be meaningful or meaningless, but few have appreciated that they can also be anti-meaningful. Anti-meaning is the polar opposite of meaning. Our purpose in this essay is to examine the nature and importance of this new and unfamiliar topic. In the first part, we sketch four theories of anti-meaning that correspond to leading theories of meaning. In the second part, we argue that anti-meaning has significance not only for our attempts to (...)
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  • Consequentialism about Meaning in Life.Ben Bramble - 2015 - Utilitas 27 (4):445-459.
    What is it for a life to be meaningful? In this article, I defend what I call Consequentialism about Meaning in Life, the view that one's life is meaningful at time t just in case one's surviving at t would be good in some way, and one's life was meaningful considered as a whole just in case the world was made better in some way for one's having existed.
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  • Meaning in Life.Thaddeus Metz - 2017 - In Benjamin Matheson & Yujin Nagasawa (eds.), The Palgrave Handbook of the Afterlife. London: Palgrave Macmillan. pp. 353-370.
    This chapter critically explores contemporary philosophical understandings of whether meaning in life might depend on the presence or absence of an afterlife. After distinguishing various kinds of afterlife, it focuses most on the potential relevance of an eternal one, and considers at length the extreme but common views amongst philosophers that an eternal afterlife would be either necessary for a meaningful life or, conversely, sufficient for a meaningless one. It concludes by considering the plausibility of a more moderate view, that (...)
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  • Knowing What Matters.Richard Yetter Chappell - 2017 - In Peter Singer (ed.), Does Anything Really Matter? Responses to Parfit. pp. 149-167.
    Parfit's On What Matters offers a rousing defence of non-naturalist normative realism against pressing metaphysical and epistemological objections. He addresses skeptical arguments based on (i) the causal origins of our normative beliefs, and (ii) the appearance of pervasive moral disagreement. In both cases, he concedes the first step to the skeptic, but draws a subsequent distinction with which he hopes to stem the skeptic's advance. I argue, however, that these distinctions cannot bear the weight that Parfit places on them. A (...)
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  • On Whether To Prefer Pain to Pass.Tom Dougherty - 2011 - Ethics 121 (3):521-537.
    Most of us are “time-biased” in preferring pains to be past rather than future and pleasures to be future rather than past. However, it turns out that if you are risk averse and time-biased, then you can be turned into a “pain pump”—in order to insure yourself against misfortune, you will take a series of pills which leaves you with more pain and better off in no respect. Since this vulnerability seems rationally impermissible, while time-bias and risk aversion seem rationally (...)
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  • (1 other version)Our stories: essays on life, death, and free will.John Martin Fischer - 2009 - New York: Oxford University Press.
    Introduction: "meaning in life and death : our stories" -- John Martin Fischer and Anthony B rueckner, "Why is death bad?", Philosophical studies, vol. 50, no. 2 (September 1986) -- "Death, badness, and the impossibility of experience," Journal of ethics -- John Martin Fischer and Daniel Speak, "Death and the psychological conception of personal identity," Midwest studies in philosophy, vol. 24 -- "Earlier birth and later death : symmetry through thick and thin," Richard Feldman, Kris McDaniel, Jason R. Raibley, eds., (...)
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  • A Darwinian dilemma for realist theories of value.Sharon Street - 2006 - Philosophical Studies 127 (1):109-166.
    Contemporary realist theories of value claim to be compatible with natural science. In this paper, I call this claim into question by arguing that Darwinian considerations pose a dilemma for these theories. The main thrust of my argument is this. Evolutionary forces have played a tremendous role in shaping the content of human evaluative attitudes. The challenge for realist theories of value is to explain the relation between these evolutionary influences on our evaluative attitudes, on the one hand, and the (...)
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  • Death.Thomas Nagel - 1970 - Noûs 4 (1):73-80.
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  • Reasons and Persons.Derek Parfit - 1984 - Oxford, GB: Oxford University Press.
    Challenging, with several powerful arguments, some of our deepest beliefs about rationality, morality, and personal identity, Parfit claims that we have a false view about our own nature. It is often rational to act against our own best interersts, he argues, and most of us have moral views that are self-defeating. We often act wrongly, although we know there will be no one with serious grounds for complaint, and when we consider future generations it is very hard to avoid conclusions (...)
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  • Death, Immortality, and Meaning in Life: Precis and Further Reflections.John Martin Fischer - 2022 - The Journal of Ethics 26 (3):341-359.
    I offer an overview of the book, _Death, Immortality, and Meaning in Life_, summarizing the main issues, arguments, and conclusions (Fischer 2020). I also present some new ideas and further developments of the material in the book. A big part of this essay is drawing connections between the specific issues treated in the book and those in other areas of philosophy, and in particular, the theory of agency and moral responsibility. I highlight some striking similarities of both structure and content (...)
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  • Against Time Bias.Preston Greene & Meghan Sullivan - 2015 - Ethics 125 (4):947-970.
    Most of us display a bias toward the near: we prefer pleasurable experiences to be in our near future and painful experiences to be in our distant future. We also display a bias toward the future: we prefer pleasurable experiences to be in our future and painful experiences to be in our past. While philosophers have tended to think that near bias is a rational defect, almost no one finds future bias objectionable. In this essay, we argue that this hybrid (...)
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  • Meaning in Life and Why It Matters (Markus Rüther).Susan Wolf - 2011 - Philosophischer Literaturanzeiger 64 (3):308.
    Most people, including philosophers, tend to classify human motives as falling into one of two categories: the egoistic or the altruistic, the self-interested or the moral. According to Susan Wolf, however, much of what motivates us does not comfortably fit into this scheme. Often we act neither for our own sake nor out of duty or an impersonal concern for the world. Rather, we act out of love for objects that we rightly perceive as worthy of love--and it is these (...)
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  • Time Biases: A Theory of Rational Planning and Personal Persistence.Meghan Sullivan - 2018 - Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press.
    Should you care less about your distant future? What about events in your life that have already happened? How should the passage of time affect your planning and assessment of your life? Most of us think it is irrational to ignore the future but harmless to dismiss the past. But this book argues that rationality requires temporal neutrality.
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  • Avoiding the Asymmetry Problem.Travis Timmerman - 2017 - Ratio 31 (1):88-102.
    If earlier-than-necessary death is bad because it deprives individuals of additional good life, then why isn't later-than-necessary conception bad for the same reason? Deprivationists have argued that prenatal non-existence is not bad because it is impossible to be conceived earlier, but postmortem non-existence is bad because it is possible to live longer. Call this the Impossibility Solution. In this paper, I demonstrate that the Impossibility Solution does not work by showing how it is possible to be conceived earlier in the (...)
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  • Our Stories: Essays on Life, Death, and Free Will * By John Martin Fischer. [REVIEW]John Fischer - 2010 - Analysis 70 (1):196-198.
    In Our Stories, John Martin Fischer offers readers a characteristically thoughtful and engaging presentation of his views on a variety of topics, most notably death, immortality and self-expression. Having come to this collection familiar primarily with Fischer's work on freedom and responsibility, I was impressed with the range of issues treated in this latest volume. While each essay is independently appealing, perhaps the most compelling aspect of Our Stories is its cohesiveness. Fischer discerns a variety of subtle connections among the (...)
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  • Against Time Bias.Preston Greene and Meghan Sullivan - 2015 - Ethics 125 (4):947-970,.
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  • Death and deprivation; or, why lucretius' symmetry argument fails.Frederik Kaufman - 1996 - Australasian Journal of Philosophy 74 (2):305 – 312.
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  • Getting All Emotional about the Fear of Death.Adam Patterson - 2021 - In T. Ryan Byerly (ed.), Death, Immortality, and Eternal Life. Routledge.
    In the contemporary fear of death literature, few if any discuss what implications insights from the philosophical literature on emotions might have for arguments about the fear of death’s rationality. I remedy that here. I discuss two types of arguments to conclusions about the fear of death’s rationality. One type is Badness Arguments. The other is Epicurean Arguments. Both argument types have contradictory conclusions. Both employ different conditional claims as their crucial premise. And both presuppose that there is some relation (...)
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  • Existential Terror.Ben Bradley - 2015 - The Journal of Ethics 19 (3-4):409-418.
    Many of us feel existential terror when contemplating our future nonexistence. I examine several attempts to rationally justify existential terror. The most promising of these appeals to the effects of future nonexistence on the meaningfulness of our lives. I argue that even this justification fails, and therefore existential terror is irrational.
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  • (1 other version)Our Stories: Essays on Life, Death, and Free Will.John Martin Fischer - 2009 - New York: Oxford University Press USA.
    In this collection of essays on the metaphysical issues pertaining to death, the meaning of life, and freedom of the will, John Martin Fischer argues that death can be a bad thing for the individual who dies. He defends the claim that something can be a bad thing--a misfortune--for an individual, even if he never experiences it as bad. Fischer also defends the commonsense asymmetry in our attitudes toward death and prenatal nonexistence: we are indifferent to the time before we (...)
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