University of Liverpool, 13-15 July 2021
Now Fully Online
Organiser:
Michael Hauskeller (University of Liverpool)
Details:
This conference will explore the relation between our mortality (and the knowledge thereof) and our experience of meaningfulness (and meaninglessness), with particular focus on the question whether death undercuts meaning in life, as some life extensionists proclaim, or whether, on the contrary, meaning depends on our mortality.
Philosophical questions arising from our global community’s growing involvement in the human enhancement project have concentrated mainly on the question whether human enhancement in general, as well as particular suggested changes in the human condition (such as the retardation and possible reversal of ageing processes), are a) desirable or undesirable, and b) ethically permissible or impermissible. Yet changes of the human condition can only ever be seen as enhancements with respect to certain purposes that have to be assumed as worth pursuing. However, there is no agreement about which purposes are ultimately worth pursuing. The main difference between those that are generally in favour of human enhancement and those who adopt a more sceptical stance is that they have different views about what matters in life. Thus the whole human enhancement debate is, in its core, a debate about meaningfulness, and the questions that are being asked about the desirability and permissibility of certain forms of suggested enhancement cannot really be answered before the more general question about what gives meaning to our life has been answered in a satisfactory way.
The conference aims to increase our understanding of a) what meaning in life is: how it is to be understood, what its constituents are, and how it can be properly distinguished from other features that are commonly thought to be required for a good life, such as happiness, b) in what way, if any, mortality can be said to be detrimental to a life’s meaningfulness and what follows from this for the desirability of radical life extension and other (limit-removing) alterations of the present human condition, and c) in what way, if any, death and mortality can be said to be requisites or at least constituents of a meaningful life.
Confirmed Invited Speakers:
Havi Carel (University of Bristol): Meaning, Value, and the Imperfect Life
Drew Castain (Loyola University New Orleans): Life Extension, Meaning, and Spiritual Experience
Michael Cholbi (University of Edinburgh): Grieving Our Way Back to Meaningfulness
Barry Dainton (University of Liverpool): Death and Ways of Avoiding Its Clutches
Guy Kahane (University of Oxford): Importance, Fame, and Transcending Limits
Frances Kamm (Harvard University): Meaning in Life as an Issue in Bioethics
Antti Kauppinen (University of Helskinki): Dying for a Cause
Teodora Manea (University of Liverpool): The Meaning of Pain and the Pain of Meaning. A Hermeneutical Analysis of Pain as an Existential Companion
Stephen McLeod (University of Liverpool): Needs, Harm, and Death
Sven Nyholm (University of Utrecht): Meaning, Anti-Meaning, and the Knowledge of Death
Thomas Schramme (University of Liverpool): Can We Measure the Harm (or Benefit) of Death?
Daniel Hill (University of Liverpool): Our Lives are Meaningful Only If We Have a Designer
James Stacey Taylor (The College of New Jersey): On Dying in Vain
Yiota Vassilopoulou (University of Liverpool): On Beauty, Death, and Meaning
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