John Martin Fischer, Our Stories: Essays on Life, Death, and Free Will

Excerpt

Our Stories brings together in one volume previously published essays (with the exception of “Stories and the Meaning of Life”) on the metaphysics of death, the normative significance of death, and the meaning people invest in their lives through their free agency. Together these provide a comprehensive and philosophically enlightening foray into the research Fischer has conducted, often in a collaborative way, over the past decade and a half. The first five chapters orient the reader to issues surrounding the enigma of death’s badness, chapters six and seven to the desirability of immortality, and chapters seven through ten to the significance of narrative in the creation of meaningful lives. Three themes recur and are given careful attention. They are the putative badness of death and the asymmetry in normal human attitudes towards pre-natal and postmortem nonexistence; the desirability of immortality; and the role of narrative in free agency. A fourth line of inquiry emerges from the third theme, and concerns the distinction between thick and thin personhood in psychological conceptions of identity. …