Category: Death and Immortality
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The Worldly Too Know that Life is Short
And so they compose 'bucket lists' of things to do before they 'kick the bucket.' It's as if, on the sinking Titanic, one were to try to make the most of the ship and its features and amenities instead of considering how one might survive the coming calamity. "There are a lot of things I…
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A Question of Time Apportionment
How much time ought to be devoted to learned inquiry into the question of immortality and how much to living in such a way as to deserve it? Related articles The Pragmatic and the Evidential: Is It Ever Rational to Believe Beyond the Evidence? Believing on Insufficient Evidence
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Is Dying an Accidental or a Substantial Change?
On animalism, I am just a (live) human animal. And so are you. But there is a reason to think that I cannot be identical to my animal body. The reason is that it will survive me. (Assume that there is no natural immortality of the soul.) Assume that I die peacefully in my bed.…
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Patrick Toner on Hylomorphic Animalism
Herewith, some comments on and questions about Patrick Toner's fascinating paper, "Hylemorphic Animalism" (Philos Stud, 2011, 155: 65-81). Patrick Toner takes an animalist line on human persons. Animalism is the doctrine that each of us is identical to an animal organism. A bit more precisely, "Animalism involves two claims: (1) we are human persons and…
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On Her Deathbed: “I Fear that There is Nothing on the Other Side”
This from a correspondent: My grandmother is on her deathbed. My mother flew out to Boston to be there with her when she dies. Of course my grandmother is putting up a good fight; however, they expected her to die yesterday. My mother had a conversation with her while she was lucid. She asked her,…
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Patrick Kurp on Philip Larkin
A post that moves me to find Larkin's Letters to Monica. Kurp quotes Larkin: I seem to walk on a transparent surface and see beneath me all the bones and wrecks and tentacles that will eventually claim me: in other words, old age, incapacity, loneliness, death of others & myself . . . . Related:…
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The Science of Older and Wiser
A worthwhile NYT piece and a good counter to Susan Jacoby's Never Say Die which I criticize in one of my better posts, appropriately entitled Never Say Die. An excerpt from the former: An impediment to wisdom is thinking, “I can’t stand who I am now because I’m not who I used to be,” said…
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Ashes to Ashes . . .
. . . dust to dust. My Epitaph Here he lies old blogger BillWhose thoughts once did the aether fillBut permalinks proved no exceptionTo the gen'ral rule of imperfection.
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A Reason to Take Care of Oneself
It may be that moral and intellectual progress is possible only here. After death it may be too late, either because one no longer exists, or because one continues to exist but in a state that does not permit further progress. It is foolish to think that believers in post-mortem survival could have no reason…
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On Taking Pleasure at the Death of an Enemy
Schadenfreude at the death of an enemy presupposes that being dead is an evil state of affairs. The decedent, however, might express, if he could, Schadenfreude of his own: "I have been released from all evils while you remain trapped." Is being dead an evil? See article below. Related articles Is Death an Evil or…
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Sudduth on Survival
Jime Sayaka interviews philosopher of religion Michael Sudduth on the topic of postmortem survival. (HT: Dave Lull) Excerpt: My central thesis is that traditional empirical arguments for survival based on the data of psychical research—what I call classical empirical arguments—do not succeed in showing that personal survival is more probable than not, much less that…
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A. J. Ayer’s Near-Death Experience
Here. (Via Reppert. Merry Christmas, Vic)
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Cat Blogging Friday: Jack and Tyke and “This Strange Scandalous Death”
Jack Kerouac was a cat man and a mama's boy. The following from Chapter 11 of Big Sur, emphasis added. After three weeks alone in Big Sur in Lawrence Ferlinghetti's Bixby canyon cabin, Kerouac, freaked out by the solitude and his metaphysical and religious brooding amidst the starkness of nature, hitch hikes for the last…
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Conceiving the Afterlife: Life 2.0 or Beatific Vision?
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.' Muslims get to do there, in a quasi-physical hinterworld, what they are forbidden to do here, for example, disport with virgins, in quantity and at length. And presumably they are…
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Three Possible Death-Bed Thoughts
I'm glad I lived, but I'm glad it's over. "I hope never to return." (Frida Kahlo) Once is enough. I wish I'd never been born. Once is too much. This is the wisdom, if wisdom it is, of Silenus, reported by Sophocles (Oedipus at Colonus, ll. 1244 ff.) and quoted by Nietzsche in The Birth…