‘Creatures of a Day’: Contingency, Mortality, and Human Limits HAVI CAREL Abstract This paper offers a nexus of terms – mortality, limits, contingency and vulnerability – painting a picture of human life as marked by limitation and finitude. I suggest that limitations of possibility, capacity, and resource are deep features of human life, but not only restrict it. Limits are also the conditions of possibility for human life and as such have productive, normative, and creative powers that not only delimit life but also scaffold growth and transformation within it. The paper takes a less known in- terpretation of the term ‘ephēmeros’, to mean ‘of the day’, rather than ‘short-lived’ and suggests that as ephemeral, human life is contingent and mutable, subject to events beyond our control. However, virtue can still be exercised – indeed, can be ex- uberantly displayed – when we respond to contingent events marked by adversity. 1. Introduction Death is not the only worrisome limit that plagues human life and demands reflective coping. There are, as philosophers have sug- gested, different kinds of finitude that characterise human existence. Heidegger (1962) points out how we can die not only biologically (an event he calls ‘demise’, ableben) but also die existentially, by becom- ing ‘unable to be’ (Carel, 2007a). Benatar (2017) has pointed out the futility and limitations of both life and death – death because it anni- hilates us and deprives us of pleasure; life because it is inherently bad. MacIntyre (1999) has laid out the ‘facts of life’ as vulnerability to affliction, dependence on others, and subjection to powerful external forces (cf. Carel and Kidd, forthcoming). Limitation – of possibility, of capacity, of resource – marks human life in deep and unsettling ways. And yet, although these limits have been tackled as a practical challenge, insofar as they have been addressed they have been seen as a negative feature of human life to be rejected, revolted against, or got rid of. 1 The reason for this may be our positive stance: embracing technological advances, hopes for 1 There are, of course, notable exceptions to this, such as the philosophy of illness and the philosophy of disability, some existentialist work and fem- inist philosophy, but these are notable for being viewed as specialised areas 193 doi:10.1017/S1358246121000369 © The Royal Institute of Philosophy and the contributors 2021 Royal Institute of Philosophy Supplement 90 2021 https://doi.org/10.1017/S1358246121000369 Published online by Cambridge University Press