Philosophy Events

The Future of Immortality

Lecture by Distinguished Professor, John Martin Fischer, of the University of California – Riverside.

Thursday, November 7th, 2024
4:00 p.m. - 5:45 p.m.
Scripps Hall Rm 111

Forum Information

Should you choose to live forever, if you could?  What does it even mean to live forever?  I will explore these issues, with special attention to the curmudgeonly concerns about whether it would still be "me," and whether it would eventually be hopelessly boring.  For as long as human beings have been thinking about these questions, there have been "optimists" and "curmudgeons."  I will try to convince you to take an optimistic view; you should indeed choose to live forever, under certain circumstances.

Professor Fischer’s main research interests lie in free will, moral responsibility, and both metaphysical and ethical issues pertaining to life and death. He is the author of dozens of articles in peer-refereed journals and numerous books, including  The Metaphysics of Free Will: An Essay on Control (opens in a new window)  (Blackwell 1994); Responsibility and Control: A Theory of Moral Responsibility (opens in a new window) (with Mark Ravizza, Cambridge University Press 1998); My Way: Essays on Moral Responsibility (opens in a new window) (Oxford University Press 2006); Free Will: Four Views (opens in a new window)  ( with Robert Kane, Derk Pereboom, and Manuel Vargas, Blackwell 2007); Our Stories: Essays on Life, Death, and Free Will (opens in a new window) (Oxford Press 2009); Deep Control: Essays on Free Will and Value  (opens in a new window) (Oxford 2011); Our Fate: Essays on God and Free Will (opens in a new window)  (Oxford 2016); Near Death Experiences: Understanding Visions of the Afterlife (opens in a new window) (with Benjamin Mitchell-Yellin, Oxford 2016); and  Death, Immortality, and Meaning in Life (opens in a new window)  (Oxford 2019).

The Ohio University Philosophy Forum, established in 1994, gives students the opportunity to study recent work of leading philosophers. Every fall term, the graduate students in the Philosophy Department take a seminar on the recent work of the year’s forum speaker, and later in the term, the students meet the speaker for three days, attending a public lecture and three intensive seminars led by the speaker.

The forum has brought to campus prominent philosophers such as Robert Nozick, Daniel Dennett, Hilary Putnam, Alasdair MacIntyre, Cora Diamond, Arthur Fine, Simon Blackburn, Susan Haack, Julia Annas, Lynne Rudder Baker, T. M. Scanlon, James Woodward, Michael Williams, Kirk Ludwig, Bas van Fraassen, Ruth Millikan, Noel Carroll, Peter Godfrey-Smith, Philip Kitcher, Michael Bratman, Elliot Sober, John Burgess, Marya Schechtman, John Doris, Rachana Kamtekar, Wayne Davis, and Arthur Ripstein.

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The Philosophy Department sponsors a History and Philosophy of Science Lecture Series and the Spetnagel Ethics Lecture Series. Each lecture series brings one or two speakers to campus every year, and before each lecture, we typically schedule an informal lunch for the graduate students and the speaker.

Recent speakers include Jeremy Butterfield, Clark Glymour, Tim Maudlin, Sandra Mitchell, Stewart Shapiro, Alexander Rosenberg, John Beatty, Alison Wylie, Colin Allen, Craig Callender, David Brink, Walter Sinnott-Armstrong, Larry Temkin, Tamar Schapiro, and David Shoemaker.

History of Philosophy and Science Lecture Series

During the 1997-98 academic year, the Philosophy Department of Ohio University initiated a lecture series with the intention of bringing to Ohio University each year two outstanding philosophers of science to discuss seminal issues in the history and/or philosophy of an individual science or the history and/or philosophy of science more generally.

Thus far, lecturers have included Adolf Grunbaum, Wesley Salmon, David Hull, Michael Friedman, Deborah Mayo, Stephen Stich, William Wimsatt, Fred Dretske, Richard Burian, John Norton, Paul Griffiths, Elliott Sober, Hartry Field, Brian Skyrms, James Woodward, James Lennox, John Worrall, Daniel Hausman, John Pollock, Paul Humphreys, John L.Bell, Margaret Morrison, Geoffrey Hellman, Christopher Hitchcock. Paolo Mancosu, Peter Achinstein, Jesse Prinz, and most recently, Laura Ruetsche, and Wilfried Sieg.

Philosophy Forum

The Ohio University Philosophy Forum, established in 1994, gives students the opportunity to study recent work of leading philosophers. Every spring term, the graduate students take a seminar on the recent work of the year’s Forum speaker, and later in the term, the students meet the speaker for three days, attending a public lecture and three intensive seminars led by the speaker.

The Forum has brought to campus Robert Nozick, Daniel Dennett, Hilary Putnam, Alasdair MacIntyre, Cora Diamond, Arthur Fine, Simon Blackburn, Susan Haack, Julia Annas, Lynne Rudder Baker, T. M. Scanlon, James Woodward, Michael Williams, Kirk Ludwig, Bas van Fraassen, Ruth Millikan, Noel Carroll, Peter Godfrey-Smith, Philip Kitcher, Michael Bratman, Elliot Sober, John Burgess, Marya Schechtman, John Doris, and Rachana Kamtekar.

Spetnagel Ethics Lecture Series

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