The Research Seminar Series in Philosophy invites you to a seminar with Christian Löw, "The Shape of an Immortal Life".
Abstract: Many philosophers have argued that immortality is less good than it sounds. In this talk, I examine an argument in Jorge Luis Borges’s story “The Immortal” to the effect that immortal lives would be objectionably incoherent. I argue that typical immortal lives indeed exhibit a kind of incoherence. This incoherence, however, is different from the one at stake in the discussion about narrative theories of well-being, which hold that good lives have some of the virtues of good stories. Nonetheless, the incoherence of typical immortal lives makes being immortal less desirable in two respects: First, immortal lives cannot stand for something in the way mortal lives can because any commitment they might display gets superimposed by other, contradictory commitments. Second, immortal lives lack narrative intelligibility. Immortals cannot gain the kind of understanding of their own lives that mortals can have. I illustrate both problems by way of Borges’s story and others of his writings. Finally, I briefly explore whether these shortcomings compromise the prudential value of an immortal life or some other value.
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