Category: Death and Immortality
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Can You Harm a Dead Man?
It would be pleasant to think that when one is dead one will be wholly out of harm's way. But is that true? Here is some Epicurean reasoning: 1. Death is annihilation. (Materialist assumption)2. A harm is a harm to someone or something: for there to be a harm, there must be a subject of harm.…
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What Exactly is the Epicurean Argument?
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…
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The Horror of Death and its Cure
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.…
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Dale Jacquette (1953 – 2016)
Professor Dale Jacquette died suddenly and unexpectedly at his home in August of this year at the age of 63. I remember Dale from the summer of 1984. We were fellow seminarians in Hector-Neri Castañeda's National Endowment for the Humanities Summer Seminar at Indiana University in Bloomington. Dale struck me at the time as a…
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Sunday Morning Sermon: Awareness of Death as Cure for Existential Drift
Our tendency is to drift through life. If life is a sea, too many of us are rudderless vessels, at the mercy of the prevailing winds of social suggestion. Death in its impending brings us up short: it forces us to confront the whole of one's life and the question of its meaning. Death is…
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The Mortalist Speaks
Why should a life limited in every other way be unlimited in temporal extension?
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Why Do We Remember the Dead?
One reason, the best reason, is to keep ourselves face-to-face with the reality of death. To live well is to live in the truth, without evasion. Transhumanist and cryonic fantasies aside, death cannot be evaded. We remember the dead, then, for our own spiritual benefit. Where they are, we will be. And soon enough. But…
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On Hitchens and Death
Christopher Hitchens died on this date in 2011. Herewith, a meditation composed in August 2010, slightly revised. ………………………………………… I just caught the last third of an interview of Christopher Hitchens by Charlie Rose. Hitchens looks bad, the chemotherapy having done a nasty tonsorial number on him. But his trademark intellectual incandescence appears undiminished. 'Brilliant' is…
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How Will Death Find Us?
We have it on good authority that death is the muse of philosophy. The muse reminds us that our time is short and to be well used. We ought to heed the following lines from St. Augustine's Confessions, Book VI, Chapter 11, Ryan trans.: Let us put away these vain and empty concerns. Let us turn…
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A Philosophical Critique of Empirical Arguments for Post-Mortem Survival
Michael Sudduth's new book.
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Saturday Night at the Oldies: Youth, Fast Cars, and Death
We are coming up on the 60th 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…
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Life’s Preparation for Death
Life prepares us for death whether we prepare or not. One way it does so is by weaning us of any over-estimation of the significance of the things of this world. For this weaning to take effect, however, one must take care to grow old. Disillusionment takes time. The passage of time, and plenty of…
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Ashes to Ashes; Dust to Dust
"Remember, man, thou art dust and unto dust thou shalt return." Memento, homo, quia pulvis es et in pulverem reverteris. This warning, from the Catholic liturgy for Ash Wednesday, is based on Genesis 3, 19: In sudore vultus tui vesceris pane, donec revertaris in terram de qua sumptus es: quia pulvis es et in pulverem…
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Michael Sudduth Hard at Work . . .
. . . on book on post-mortem survival. (HT: Dave Lull. Happy New Year, Dave!)
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The Lonesome Death of an Old Australian Woman
Here (HT: Karl White) A ninety year old woman died in her home in Auburn. She had decomposed through the floor before she was found six months later. The diaries found in her belongings shed light on this lonely and brilliant mind. Watch the documentary above, and read further excerpts from her diaries below. Related…