BOREDOM, HUMAN PSYCHOLOGY, AND IMMORTALITY

Bernard Williams has famously argued that an immortal life would necessarily be boring. Despite the obvious importance that boredom occupies in Williams’s argument, he says very little about the nature of boredom. In this paper, I argue that attention to the empirical literature on boredom reveals a serious flaw in Williams’s argument. Specifically, I show that there is no available explication of boredom that is supported by the empirical research and which at the same time establishes Williams’s conclusions.