Category: Suicide
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Saturday Night at the Oldies: Some Suicides
First a positive note: A Dylan biopic is coming, A Complete Unknown. ………………………… Del Shannon (Charles Weedon Westover), December 30, 1934 – February 8, 1990, known prmarily for his Billboard Hot 100 #1 hit, Runaway, 1961. "Suffering from depression, Shannon committed suicide on February 8, 1990, with a .22-caliber rifle at his home in Santa Clarita, California, while on…
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Contemplating Suicide?
Look before you make the leap of faith in ultimate nonentity. There may be no exit. Top o' the Stack. Girlfriend dumped you? Give it six months, and you may wonder what you ever saw in her. The Stoic method of division may help you over the hump, the slump, the slough of despond.
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Kant on Suicide
Substack latest, with quotations from the forgotten Paul Ludwig Landsberg.
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Contemplating Suicide?
Are you quite sure that there is a way out? It may be that there is no exit. You can of course destroy your body, and that might do the trick. But then again it might not. Or is it perfectly obvious that you are either identical to your body or necessarily dependent for your…
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Big Sur, Kerouac, and Being on the Edge
Dwight Green writes, I had forgotten about your focus on the Beats in October (more of a remembrance of Kerouac, if I remember right) until I saw your recent post introducing it for this year. A couple of years ago I drove to the Big Sur area and was unable to do much hiking…
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Happiness and Suicide
Happiness eluded this student of happiness despite his career success and the admiration of his peers. So at age 38 he jumped off a tall building.
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Suicide as Premature Jailbreak
Man up, and serve your time in the penal colony of the world. You'll die soon enough.
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Clinical Depression and the Moral Permissibility of Suicide
I detect a cri du coeur in the following question to me from a reader: Do you believe it is morally permissible for an unmarried person who is now middle-aged (late 40's) and who has no children to care for and who has battled clinical depression and anxiety for many years to commit suicide? Since this is an…
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Real Enough to Debase, but not to Satisfy
Today is the Feast of St. Augustine. At Confessions, Bk. VI, Ch. 11, Augustine speaks of "a greed for enjoying present things that both fled me and debased me." A paradox of pleasure. Certain pleasures madly striven after prove fleeting and unreal, yet not so fleeting and unreal that they cannot degrade and debase their…
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Suicide
I cannot erase a truth by erasing the sentence that expresses it; can I erase my self by erasing the body that is its worldly vehicle and expression? Filed under: Questions
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Suicide
One problem with suicide is that it is a permanent solution to what is often a merely temporary problem.
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On Suicide
My knowledge of my ignorance regarding the ultimate disposition of things keeps me from viewing suicide as a live option should the going get tough. I lack the complacent assurance of those atheists and mortalists who are quite sure that there is no afterlife. I also lack the complacent assurance of those theists and immortalists…
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Man Does Not Live by Bread Alone
The recent suicide of Anthony Bourdain, celebrity chef and 'foodie,' offers food for thought. Why would so apparently successful and well-liked a man suddenly hang himself in his hotel room? One can only speculate on the basis of slender evidence, and it is perhaps morally dubious to do so. On the other hand, not to…
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Kant on Suicide
Is suicide ever morally permissible? Cutting against the Enlightenment grain, Kant delivers a resoundingly negative verdict. Suicide is always and everywhere morally wrong. This entry is part of an effort to understand his position. Unfortunately, Kant's treatment is exceedingly murky and one of his arguments is hard to square with what he says elsewhere. In his Lectures…
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Benatar on Suicide: Is Suicide Murder?
This is the eleventh entry in a series on David Benatar's The Human Predicament (Oxford UP, 2017). I have decided to skip ahead to Chapter 7, "Suicide," and leave Chapter 6, "Immortality," for later. This episode discusses pp. 163-172. We have seen that for Benatar death, being a part of the human predicament, contra Epicurus, is no solution to…