Maverick Philosopher

Footnotes to Plato from the foothills of the Superstition Mountains

Category: Death and Immortality

  • Saturday Night at the Oldies: Youth, Fast Cars, and Death

    Tomorrow is the 57th anniversary of the death of James Dean.  When the young  Dean crashed his low slung silver Porsche Spyder on a lonely California highway on September 30, 1955, he catapulted a couple of unknowns into the national spotlight.  One of them was Ernie Tripke, one of two California Highway Patrol officers who…

  • More on my Non-Identity With My Living Body

    Maximilian J. Nightingale writes: You laid out this syllogism in a recent post: My living body will  become a dead body;  I will never become a dead body; therefore, I am  not identical to a living body. It seems to me that if "becoming" means the same thing in both the first and the second…

  • The Wit and Mortality of Christopher Hitchens

    I just breezed through a quick first reading of Christopher Hitchens' Mortality (Twelve, 2012).  The slim volume ends with some fragmentary notes of characteristic wit scribbled near the end.  My favorites: Amazing how heart and lungs have held up: would have been healthier if I'd been more sickly. (88) I'm not fighting or battling cancer…

  • My Epitaph

    Here he lies old blogger BillWhose thoughts once did the ether fillBut permalinks proved no exceptionTo the gen'ral rule of imperfection.

  • Death and Time

    Death is as certain as the passage of time — and as real.  But how real is that?

  • Et in Arcadia Ego

    Death says, "I too am in Arcadia." The contemplation of death, one's own in particular, cures one of the conceit that this life has a meaning absolute and self-contained.  Only those who live naively in this world, hiding from themselves the fact of death, flirting with transhumanist arcadian and other utopian fantasies, can accord to this…

  • Death, Where is Thy Sting?

    We are concerned that life is short and that its end approaches.  But there is consolation in the contrary thought that we are getting through this life, that a time will come when we can lay down its burdens of pain, disappointment, ignorance, and moral failure.  The end is the end of the goods of…

  • Mortalism Again

    According to Peter Heinegg, mortalism is "the belief that the soul — or spark of life, or animating principle, or whatever — dies with the body. . . ." (Mortalism: Readings on the Meaning of Life,   Prometheus, 2003, p. 9). That anyone should be a mortalist does not surprise me, but it does surprise me…

  • Wise Man and Fool on Their Death Beds

    Wise man:  This world is a vanishing quantity.  I am glad soon to be quit of it.  It has nothing to offer in the end but bagatelles that can fool only the foolish and must leave the wise unsatisfied.  Vanitas vanitatum; omnia vanitas. Fool:  Do not go gentle into that good night, Old age should…

  • Is Death an Evil or Not?

    I go back and forth on this question.  I should be ashamed of myself.  Forty years a philosopher and no fixed view on such a fundamental question?  What am I (not) being paid to do?  To gain some clarity, I will sketch some possible views.  I will also sketch the  view to which  I incline…

  • Afterlife Again

    Yesterday I wrote: The epitaph on Frank Sinatra's tombstone reads, "The best is yet to come." That may well be, but it won't be booze and broads, glitz and glamour, and the satisfaction of worldly ambitions that were frustrated this side of the grave. So the believer must sincerely ask himself: would I really want…

  • The Mortalist’s Hope

    Must not the materialist, the mortalist hope that bodily death is the absolute end as death draws near? For he has lived as if it is. He has made no provision for anything else. He has decided that this life is all there is and has lived accordingly. He hopes he is in for no…

  • Is a Thinking Person’s Afterlife Conceivable?

    As far as I can tell, the popular Islamic conception of the afterlife is unbelievably crass, a form of what might be called 'spiritual materialism.' You get to do there, in a quasi-physical world behind the scenes, what you are forbidden to do here, for example, disport with virgins, in quantity and at length. And…

  • Mortalism

    According to Peter Heinegg, mortalism is "the belief that the soul – or spark of life, or animating principle, or whatever — dies with the body. . . ." (Mortalism: Readings on the Meaning of Life,   Prometheus, 2003, p. 9). Heinegg was raised Catholic and indeed was a member of the Jesuit order for seven years.…

  • Death as Equalizer, II

    John Derbyshire ends his The Endless Pursuit of Happiness with a de Gaulle anecdote: The de Gaulles had a daughter, Anne, afflicted with Down syndrome. De Gaulle adored her, but as often happens in such cases, Anne died young. At her graveside when the service was over, de Gaulle turned to his wife and said:…