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This entry is an addendum to The Horror of Death and its Cure. Here is one way to construe the Epicurean argument: A. No person P can rationally fear any state S such that, in S, P isn't having any experiences. B. A dead person is in a state, being dead, such that he is not having any experiences. Ergo C. No person P can rationally fear being dead. A correspondent suggests that this is indeed the Epicurean argument, but goes on to question (A).   I too question (A).  Suppose a man makes sure that his wife and children will be provided for should he die by doing such things as elimi ..read more

Are there nonexistent objects in the sense in which Meinong thought there are? One reason to think so  derives from the problem of reference to the dead. The problem can be displayed as an aporetic tetrad: 1. A dead person no longer exists. 2. What no longer exists does not exist at all.  3. What does not exist at all cannot be referred to or enter as a constituent into a state of affairs. 4. Some dead persons can be referred to and can enter as constituents into states of affairs.  (For example, 'John Lennon' in 'John Lennon is dead' refers to John Lennon, who  i ..read more

Robert Blake is back in the news, which fact justifies, as if justification is needed, a re-post from 18 May 2011. .................................. Epicurus (circa 341-271 B.C.) wrote the following to a disciple:      I understand from you that your natural disposition is too much      inclined toward sexual passion. Follow your inclinations as you      will provided only that you neither violate the laws, disturb      well-established customs, harm any one of your neighbors, injure      your ..read more

Herewith, a rumination on death with Epicurus as presiding shade. The following two propositions are both logically inconsistent and yet very plausible: 1. Being dead is not an evil for anyone at any time.  2. Being dead at a young age is an evil for some. Obviously, the limbs of the dyad cannot both be true.  Each entails the negation of the other.  And yet each limb lays serious claim to our acceptance.  (1) is rendered credible by Epicurean reasoning along the following lines. It is reasonably maintained that bodily death is annihilation of the self or person ..read more

Many find the Epicurean reasoning about death sophistical. Among those who do, we encounter some strange bedfellows. To compress the famous reasoning into a trio of sentences: When we are, death is not. When death is, we are not. Therefore, death is nothing to us, and nothing to fear. The distinguished German Thomist, Josef Pieper, in his Death and Immortality (Herder and Herder, 1969, orig. publ. in 1968 under the title Tod und Unsterblichkeit) speaks of . . . a deception which men have long employed, particularly in classical antiquity, in the attempt to overcome the fear of death. I refe ..read more

This is the tenth installment  in a series on David Benatar's The Human Predicament (Oxford UP, 2017). We are still in the very rich Chapter 5, "Death." Herewith, commentary on pp. 123-128.  My answer to the title question is No, but our author has very effectively shown that the Epicurean argument is not compelling, and perhaps even that it is more reasonably rejected than accepted. It may smack of sophistry, but the Epicurean argument is one of the great arguments of philosophy, forcing us as it does to think hard about ultimates. That's what philosophy is ..read more

This is the seventh entry in a series on David Benatar's The Human Predicament (Oxford UP, 2017). We are still in Chapter 5 and will be here for some time. This entry covers pp. 98-102. Recall the Issue If one is a mortalist, but also holds that human life is objectively bad, then one might naturally view death as escape or release, and therefore as good, or at least as not bad. This is the view I would hold if I were a mortalist. I am not in fact a mortalist: I believe in God, (libertarian) freedom, and immortality. I also hold that no one can establish with certainty the ..read more

Vlastimil asks, "In which sense exactly IS it bad FOR the young person to BE deprived AT the time he NO longer exists? It's a nice sentence to say but I just don't know what it is supposed to mean." We are assuming mortalism, the view that the body's death is the death of the person in toto. When physical death supervenes, the person will cease to exist even if his body continues to exist for a while as a corpse. The question is: Is it bad to be dead for the person who is dead? (Typically, it will be bad for others, but that is not the question.) And let's be clear that we are speaking of the ..read more

There is dying, there is being dead, and there is the momentary transition from the one to the other.   While we rightly fear the suffering and indignity of dying, especially if the process is drawn out over weeks or months, it is the anticipation of the moment of death that some of us find horrifying.  This horror is something like Heideggerian Angst which, unlike fear (Furcht), has no definite object.  Fear has a definite object; in this case the dying process. Anxiety is directed -- but at the unknown, at nothing in particular. For what horrifies some of us is the prospe ..read more