The inspiration for this dissertation dates back to an independent study directed by Marty Heitz in the spring of 2018 at Oklahoma State University. We spent the term slowly working our way through Heidegger's Being and Time and I quickly found myself both confused and enamored by Heidegger's treatment of human mortality. This interest was indulged and refined during my graduate studies both as a master's and doctoral student at Marquette University, where kind professors such as Pol Vandevelde, Michael Wreen, and Noel Adams allowed me to continue pursuing my interest in mortality from a variety of frameworks. Thus, in the broadest possible terms, the project stems from my long-running interest in how we ought to approach and respond to our own mortality, the connection between mortality and meaning, and how considerations of the desirability of immortality can inform our valuation of mortality. 

The dissertation itself has both a historical and applied dimension, but even my interest in the history of philosophy is less about history for history’s sake and more about what we can do with the history of philosophy – namely, use it as a springboard for understanding both the present and the timeless. 

The first two chapters begin with a historical consideration of the centrality of mortality in the work of Heidegger and Kierkegaard.  Chapter one advances a new interpretation of Heidegger’s account of mortality and its affordances, which rejects a growing trend in the scholarship that has come to be known as the “world-collapse” view. Chapter two considers Kierkegaard’s connection of mortality and subjectivity in “At a Graveside” and Postscript. My primary interest in these chapters is to use the groundwork of Heidegger and Kierkegaard as a basis for my own framework, which I call genuine mortality consciousness (GMC for short). On this view, a lucid understanding of one’s own mortality, and one’s willingness to hold onto it in the present is essential to human flourishing, because it allows us to pursue our lives with focus, urgency, and an authentic orientation. The cultivation of genuine mortality consciousness provides us with the possibility of pruning our life projects in order to prioritize those that are most important, and I propose that it is our mortality that imbues our lives with their distinctively finite significance.

This background of GMC provides the theoretical underpinning of my more applied work in chapters three through five. Chapter three provides reasons to reject both Epicureanism and Nagelian deprivationism about death, arguing that neither view is conducive to human flourishing. Nagel’s deprivation account is typically viewed as the model critique of Epicureanism about death, but one of the more provocative claims of my dissertation is that Nagel’s position actually succumbs to the same fundamental flaw of the Epicurean position by promoting an attitude of indifference towards one’s death, thereby denying death its power to inform life.  

Chapters four and five argue against the desirability of immortality and the permissibility of radical life-extension technologies. Here, I utilize the framework of GMC and its connection of finitude and meaning, to construct a novel argument against the desirability of immortality, engaging the work of Bernard Williams, Hans Jonas, and John Fischer. The core argument is called the deprivation account of immortality. Just as the deprivation account of the badness of death argues that death is bad for the one who dies because it deprives them of the goods of life, the deprivation account of immortality holds that immortality would deprive us of life’s meaningfulness. This argument also opens the door to a new objection to Pascal’s Wager, which is itself motivated by the infinite worth of immortality. If we lack good reason to think that immortality would be good for creatures like us, then the desire for immortality cannot serve as a ground for religious faith. Instead, the inverse is required – one would first need to believe in an all-good and all-powerful God and trust that such a Being could make immortality good for us in ways that we cannot currently understand.