Disorderly Time: What Death and Midlife Crises May or May Not Reveal about Value

As Susan Wolf (2015 [1999]) suggests, value theory is concerned with questions that are simultaneously universal and personal. Nonetheless, there is little attention paid to the question of the personal uptake of these questions. Arguments that cite the examples of near-death experiences (or, more strongly, the deathbed) and midlife crises focus on the idea that these experiences provide special (albeit defeasible) access to questions about intrinsic value and meaningfulness. These experiences are, it is thought, a helpful corrective to the distractions that interfere with our ability to know what has intrinsic value or what would make our lives (more) meaningful. The problem is that it is not clear why (or, more skeptically, whether) these experiences actually do this.

In this talk, I have three aims. First, I show that though the deathbed and midlife crises are, in line with our intuitions and our everyday parlance, what I dub "vantage points on value," it is not for the familiar re