Philosophy Department

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 (Blackwell 1994); Responsibility and Control: A Theory of Moral Responsibility (with Mark Ravizza, Cambridge University Press 1998); My Way: Essays on Moral Responsibility (Oxford University Press 2006); Free Will: Four Views (with Robert Kane, Derk Pereboom, and Manuel Vargas, Blackwell 2007); Our Stories: Essays on Life, Death, and Free Will (Oxford Press 2009); Deep Control: Essays on Free Will and Value (Oxford 2011); Our Fate: Essays on God and Free Will (Oxford 2016); Near Death Experiences: Understanding Visions of the Afterlife (with Benjamin Mitchell-Yellin, Oxford 2016); and Death, Immortality, and Meaning in Life (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.