Contribution
A short, admiring review. Its use to the record is as a report of the parts of the book the Tanner text lacks: the third lecture, the four commentaries and, barely, the replies.
Key insight
The book holds two theses that pull against each other, and Scheffler says so. Death gives our values their status, so immortality would not help. Yet our confidence in those values depends on others living after us. Cottingham quotes Scheffler calling the conclusion “strange and unsettling” (book p. 109).
Assumptions
- A reviewer’s selection. What the review reports of each part is what Cottingham chose to report.
- Cottingham’s own stance. He wants religious reflection on finitude admitted to the discussion, and calls the empirical question of how we would react “philosophically less interesting” than the normative one.
Key results
- What the book is. The two 2012 Tanner Lectures at Berkeley and a third paper “delivered at Chicago the previous year”; four commentaries (Wolf, Frankfurt, Shiffrin, Kolodny) and Scheffler’s replies. 210 pp.
- Lectures I and II, as reported. The conjecture; the nonconsequentialist point; “we need humanity to have a future for the very idea that things matter to retain a secure place in our conceptual repertoire” (p. 60); non-believers in personal immortality go on valuing (p. 71); the infertile world’s “apathy, anomie, and despair” (p. 40); and “there is a very specific sense in which our own survival is less important to us than the survival of the human race” (p. 73). Cottingham glosses this as “a more altruistic construal of the human condition”, reminiscent of Parfit.
- The third lecture (“final lecture”, on death). As reported:
- Unlike Parfit, Scheffler calls “incredible” any view that denies a personal egocentric subject (p. 103).
- He holds the fear of death reasonable, or not unreasonable, while agreeing with Williams that personal immortality would not be desirable (p. 107).
- “it is essential to our idea of a life that it is temporally bounded” (p. 100), and what we cherish has the status of values “because of their role in our finite and bounded lives” (p. 100).
- So death is needed for confidence in what we value, yet that confidence depends on others being alive after we die (p. 109). The Cunning Little Vixen’s frog closes it: life continues.
- Frankfurt. Questions whether the desire for humanity to continue is as altruistic as Scheffler implies, and suggests its significance may come to little more than that “natural selection has ensured that we have those desires” (p. 138).
- Wolf (“the most interesting of the critiques”). Questions the key premise that impending doom would undercut our faith in our projects. Extinction would disorient at first, but we could “snap out of it” (p. 128). Against Scheffler’s reading of Alvy Singer, there would still be time and reason to “create beauty, gain wisdom and help each other” (p. 127). Cottingham credits her with turning the debate to how we ought to react.
- Shiffrin and Kolodny are named only. The replies are mentioned, not summarized.
- Cottingham’s objection. Scheffler and his critics leave out religious thought, though finitude, not personal immortality, is central to much of it; the problems are approached through recent science fiction alone.
Claims
| id | claim | strength | support |
|---|---|---|---|
| C1 | The book’s third lecture holds that a life must be temporally bounded for its goods to be values, so immortality is no remedy | report of the reviewed text, with quotation | third and fourth paragraphs on the final lecture |
| C2 | Frankfurt doubts the concern for humanity’s continuation is altruistic, offering a Darwinian explanation | report, one sentence | commentaries paragraph |
| C3 | Wolf denies that impending extinction would, or should, undercut the value of our projects | report, with two quotations | Wolf paragraph |
| C4 | Excluding religious reflection on finitude impoverishes the discussion | Cottingham’s own view, argued briefly | closing paragraphs |
Concepts
- doomsday and infertility scenarios, as in Scheffler.
- temporal boundedness of a life: the third lecture’s claim that a life’s having a beginning, middle and end is essential to its goods being values.
Connections
- Scheffler’s lectures (NOTE-1306-scheffler). The review’s pages 40, 60, 71 and 73 match passages in Lecture I, part 8 and Lecture II, parts 2 and 5 of the Tanner text, which fits Crossref’s placing of the two lectures at pp. 14–82.
- Williams on the Makropulos case, which the third lecture accepts.
- Parfit (THEORY-464), from whom Cottingham distinguishes Scheffler.
Bearing on the record
- The owner’s thesis (CLAIM-491). Two points, both inferences.
- Cottingham reads the book as “a more altruistic construal” and says Scheffler finds us “far less selfish than is often supposed”. The Tanner text says the opposite about altruism: the result is dependence on future people, not unsuspected altruism. A reader of the review alone would overstate the book as a case against the thesis.
- Frankfurt’s doubt is the thesis’s side of the argument, made from evolution rather than from the self; Wolf’s is the opposite: that the value of our projects does not depend on the collective afterlife at all, which would remove the case altogether.
- The legacy question (QUESTION-301). The third lecture’s pairing is relevant: we need our own death for our values and others’ lives after it for our confidence in them. Legacy, on this picture, is not a substitute for survival.
- No dated note. What matters here enters through the Scheffler NOTE’s note. No THEORY filed. No ML instruction.
Limitations
- A review, under 2,000 words, of a 210-page book. Shiffrin and Kolodny are only named, the replies not summarized.
- A misreport. The review puts the asteroid “thirty years after the life of our generation has come to an end”. In Scheffler it is thirty days after one’s own death.
- The book’s text is not checked: page numbers and quotations are the reviewer’s.
- Typo: “Scheffler’s s two 2012 Tanner lectures”.
Open questions
- What do Shiffrin (“Preserving the Valued or Preserving Valuing?”) and Kolodny argue, and what do the replies concede? Crossref lists the fourth commentary as “That I Should Die and Others Live” with no author; the review gives no titles.