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We are born, we live, we suffer along the way, and then we die-obliterated for the rest of eternity. Our existence is but a blip in cosmic time and space. It is not surprising that so many people ask: "What is it all about?" The right answer, I argue in this book, is "ultimately nothing." Despite some limited consolations, the human condition is in fact a tragic predicament from which none of us can escape, for the predicament consists not merely in life but also in death. It should come as no surprise that this is an unpopular view to which there will be considerable resistance. Thus, I ask my readers to keep an open mind while they read the arguments for my (generally though not entirely) bleak view. The truth is often ugly. (For some light relief, see the occasional joke or quip in the notes.) Some readers may wonder what the relationship is between this book and my previous book (Better Never to Have Been 1) in which I argued for other grim views-that coming into existence is a serious harm, and the anti-natalist conclusion that we ought not to create new beings. The first part of the answer is that, although the earlier book mentioned some of the topics covered in The Human Predicament, it did not discuss them in any depth. The one point of significant overlap between the earlier book and the current one is that both discuss the poor quality of human life. Because I had examined that in some detail in Better Never to Have Been, I did consider omitting it entirely from The Human Predicament. However, the quality of life is so much a part of the human predicament that forgoing any examination of it seemed like an egregious omission. That said, the arguments have been developed since I first presented them in Better Never to Have Been. I wrote about them afresh in chapter 3 of Debating Procreation 2 and then adapted that chapter for inclusion in The Human Predicament. While the subject matters of Better Never to Have Been and The Human Predicament are very different, and while the arguments in the latter do not presuppose anti-natalism, they do provide further support for that view. Although I have been working for many years on the themes covered in this volume, a draft of the book was written while I was a visiting scholar in the Bioethics Department at the National Institutes of Health (NIH), in Bethesda, Maryland. I am required to state-which I do with some amusement, because it is difficult in this case to imagine the confusion-that "the views expressed are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect those of the Clinical Center, the National Institutes of Health, or the Department of Health and Human Services." It is my pleasure to add my thanks to the Bioethics Department for sponsoring my visit and for welcoming me for the stimulating academic year (2014-2015) I spent there. The theme of the Bioethics Department's Joint Bioethics Colloquium in the spring semester was "death," a happy coincidence about an unhappy topic. I benefited from discussions there and in a similarly themed reading group. At...

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Abstract. As a belief source, testimony has long been held by theorists of the mind to play a deeply important role in human cognition. It is unclear, however, just why testimony has been afforded such cognitive importance. We distinguish three suggestions on the matter: the number claim, which takes testimony's cognitive importance to be a function of the number of beliefs it typically yields, relative to other belief sources; the reliability claim, which ties the importance of testimony to its relative truth-conduciveness; and the scope claim, according to which testimony's importance is a function of its relative representational power, non-numerically conceived. After laying out these three suggestions, we go on to argue that there is little hope of grounding testimony's cognitive importance in either the number claim or the reliability claim. We conclude with a tentative exploration of the basis and plausibility of the scope claim.

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