Michael Shermer with John Martin Fischer — Death, Immortality and Meaning in Life (Science Salon 95)

Listen to the Science Salon Podcast # 95(audio-only):


John Martin Fischer’s Death, Immortality, and Meaning in Life offers 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).

This dialogue was recorded on August 14, 2019 as part of the Science Salon Podcast series hosted by Michael Shermer and presented by The Skeptics Society, in California.

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