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Bernard Williams and Viktor Frankl have made the opposite claim that death gives meaning to life. Although there has been much scrutiny of the former claim, the latter claim has received very little attention. In this paper, I will explore whether and how death gives meaning to our lives.
Feb 12, 2022 · I offer an overview of the book, Death, Immortality, and Meaning in Life , summarizing the main issues, arguments, and conclusions (Fischer 2020).
- Meaning in Life
- Epicurean Challenges
- The No-Experience Problem
- The Deprivation Theory of Death’s Badness and Fear of Death
- The Immortality Curmudgeons and their Concerns
- Immortality in an Afterlife
- Near-Death Experiences: Supernaturalism
- When?
- Why Universality of Content?
- Near-Death Experiences, Naturalism, and Meaning
We typically (although not always) take premature death to be bad for the individual who dies—especially for those beings (like us) capable of living meaningful lives. Indeed, premature death is sometimes thought to be a tragedy for the deceased. (I will return to these assumptions of “common sense” in discussing death’s putative badness.) There is...
The Epicurean contends that death cannot be a bad thing for the individual who dies, because there is no individual left to be the subject of this purported misfortune. The point that there is no individual left implies that the status of being dead (as opposed to the process of dying) involves no unpleasant experiences on the part of the indi-vidu...
believe that various things can be bad for an individual, even though she doesn’t have negative experiences as a result: experience is not all there is to harm or badness (just as it is not all there is to goodness). I thus reject “experiential ethics,” and, more generally, the view that all kinds of value can be reduced to, or defined in terms of,...
Why is death bad for the individual who dies, when it is indeed bad? An influen-tial view is the deprivation account of death’s badness, according to which (roughly speaking) death deprives the deceased of goods she would have had, but for her early death. These goods would have made that life (in which she lives longer) better than the life she ac...
Daring to fire some salvos in the “Forever” Wars, I consider a panoply of arguments ofered by the Immortality Curmudgeons, who are certainly in the majority among philosophers (historically and now). A large majority of philosophers (especially in contemporary discussions) are dreary spoil-sports about immortality! Such argu-ments include the worry...
There are diferent routes to immortality: secular and religious. I argue that many of the same issues arise as to the potential desirability (and even coherence) of secular and religious immortality. One might say that Mark Twain ([original date unavailable]/1970) is to skepticism about the desirability of religious immortality (in some sort of “af...
Many, including (somewhat) scholarly writers on the subject, think that near-death experiences (NDEs) are a portal into immortality in the religious sense. They adopt the doctrine of “supernaturalism about NDEs,” according to which our minds are nonphysical (the doctrine of dualism—typically substance dualism), separate from our bodies in NDEs, and...
It is a staple of the NDE literature that NDEs take place when the brain is “ofline” in the sense in which it could support consciousness (as opposed to the biological “housekeeping” tasks). This “NDE Timing Problem” plays a big role here, as in the discussion of the time of death’s badness. It is however totally unwarranted to conclude from the sc...
NDEs have similar content across cultures and times, although the specific details are diferent and to some extent culturally determined. They typically contain some (but not necessarily all) of the following: an out-of-body experience, travel toward another (otherworldy) realm guided by deceased loved ones and/or religious figures, vivid colors an...
For the supernaturalist, the story of NDEs is a story of separation from one’s body and travel toward (and sometimes into) an otherworldly realm. The stories purport-edly show, as in the title of a prominent book, that “heaven is for real.” They ofer a “proof of heaven.” These interpretations select only parts of the reported contents of most NDEs,...
Death is a state in which, on two occasions 24 hours apart, there is unreceptivity. and unresponsivity to all stimuli, lack of movement or spontaneous breathing, lack of reflexes, a flat electroencephalogram, and an absence of hypothermia or. drug overdosage as preceding events.2.
death. The rules of the game of life dictate that we cannot play it without knowing that it comes to an end. Are there, then, winners and losers, the saved and the damned? Indeed, the idea of death as life’s paradox allows me to explore the fundamental issues of existence within the tradition of
Understanding bereavement . Each person has an individual response to their specific loss. Theoretical concepts of what is “normal” regarding bereavement can help predict a greater risk of complicated bereavement and even diagnosis of pathological, unresolved grief.
Dec 4, 1999 · Gene Rayburn, who became a mainstay on television from the 1960's to the 80's as the amiable host of ''The Match Game,'' died on Monday at his home in Beverly, Mass. He was 81. The cause...
