Kiki Berk

Ted Chiang’s short stories are among the most thought-provoking works of science fiction published in the last few decades. This chapter focuses on the philosophical ideas in two of these stories: “Omphalos” (2019) and “Exhalation” (2008). “Omphalos” raises questions about the relationship between God and the meaning of life, while “Exhalation” raises questions about death and how we ought to respond to it. With the help of theories and concepts from contemporary philosophy, this chapter explores and analyzes what these two stories have to say about death, God, and the meaning of life.

This paper identifies and analyzes the arguments against the desirability of immortality implicit in Beauvoir’s philosophical novel All Men Are Mortal. The main argument is based on the idea that an immortal life would necessarily lack four key values that make human life worth living: meaning, love, identity, and virtue. The novel contains four additional arguments, one regarding each specific value. I analyze and evaluate all five arguments and place them in the context of the ongoing debate over immortality’s desirability. I also identify connections between Beauvoir’s arguments and those of Bernard Williams, Martha Nussbaum, and Samuel Sheffler. Ultimately, I argue that Beauvoir’s arguments in All Men Are Mortal are original and plausible. As such, they can enrich the contemporary debate over the desirability of immortality. Understanding them also contributes to a better understanding of Beauvoir’s philosophy of death.

The Man from Earth (2007) is an independent American film, based on a screenplay by the science-fiction writer Jerome Bixby (1923–1998), which tells the story of John Oldman – a 14,000-year-old man who looks to be in his mid-30s. This thought-provoking cult classic raises the philosophical question of whether immortality is desirable, and its answer is yes. This might not sound all that surprising unless you know that the most important paper on this topic in contemporary philosophy, Bernard Williams’s “The Makropulos Case: Reflections on the Tedium of Immortality” (1973), argues just the opposite – that an immortal life, no matter how wonderful, would be undesirable. The main purpose of this chapter is to bring The Man from Earth into dialogue with Williams’s classic paper. In addition, this chapter discusses a number of contemporary responses to Williams’s paper and explores some lesser-known arguments against the desirability of immortality, in particular those offered by Simone de Beauvoir (in 1946) and Martha Nussbaum (in 1989). This chapter argues that the core philosophical thesis of The Man from Earth, namely that immortality is desirable, holds its own against these arguments from so-called “immortality curmudgeons.”

Existential crises come in different flavors, but they're typically evoked by confrontations with mortality and accompanied by feelings of existential angst. The English philosopher Bernard Williams (1929–2003) argues that immortality would not be a good thing and that an endless life would become so excruciatingly and unbearably boring that all of us would want “out” at some point. This is exactly what happens in The Good Place. The idea that death makes life meaningful seems to be one of the major moral lessons of The Good Place. Naturalists (about meaning) think that individual human lives can still be meaningful even if the human species wasn't created for a purpose. The Good Place seems to weigh in on the side of naturalism. The underlying message of existential crises in The Good Place is that the key to a meaningful life is to be a morally good person.