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Birth and death mark the limits of our lives. We’re thrown into existence, and one day we pass out of it. “Men must endure their going hence, even as their coming hither,” Shakespeare wrote.
But we live in an age when those limits are in question. Silicon Valley’s most ambitious dreams have to do with birth and death. Some imagine the randomness of birth mastered and transformed into a process of fine-tuning. At the other end, some imagine radical life extension, the reversal of aging, even digital immortality. We dream of stepping beyond the horizons of mortal life.
How do these horizons define us, shape us, reveal us? How do we confront the opacity of our origins and our endings? Are our finitude and mortality challenges to be overcome — or constitutive of our humanity?
Joanna Stalnaker is Professor of French at Columbia and author of The Rest Is Silence: Enlightenment Philosophers Facing Death (YUP, 2025). Jennifer Banks is Senior Executive Editor for Religion and the Humanities at Yale University Press and author of Natality: Toward a Philosophy of Birth (W.W. Norton, 2023). Last month, they joined our Samuel Kimbriel to discuss birth, death, and everything in between.
We’re proud to share with you this singularly thoughtful conversation about ultimate things.
(P.S. For more from Joanna, read her marvelous essay, “Against Immortality,” published earlier this week.)
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