World Philosophers on Death PDF Download

Author: Don Ciraulo
Publisher:
ISBN: 9781524924430
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 330

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Author: Simon Critchley
Publisher: Melbourne Univ. Publishing
ISBN: 0522855148
Category : Death
Languages : en
Pages : 336

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Book Description
Diogenes died by holding his breath. Plato allegedly died of a lice infestation. Diderot choked to death on an apricot. Nietzsche made a long, soft-brained and dribbling descent into oblivion after kissing a horse in Turin. From the self-mocking haikus of Zen masters on their deathbeds to the last words (gasps) of modern-day sages, The Book of Dead Philosophers chronicles the deaths of almost 200 philosophers-tales of weirdness, madness, suicide, murder, pathos and bad luck. In this elegant and amusing book, Simon Critchley argues that the question of what constitutes a 'good death' has been the central preoccupation of philosophy since ancient times. As he brilliantly demonstrates, looking at what the great thinkers have said about death inspires a life-affirming enquiry into the meaning and possibility of human happiness. In learning how to die, we learn how to live.

Author: Alex Long
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1107086590
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 241

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Provides an accessible account of the variety and subtlety of Greek and Roman philosophy of death, from Homer to Marcus Aurelius.

Author: J.E Malpas
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1134653972
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 228

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Book Description
Death and Philosophy considers these questions with different perspectives varying from the existentialist - deriving from Camus, Heidegger or Sartre, to the English speaking analytic tradition of Bernard Williams or Thomas Nagel; to non-wester approaches such as are exemplified in the Tibetan Book of the Dead and in Daoist thought; to perspectives influenced by Lucretious, Epicurus and Nietzsche. Death and Philosophy will be of great interest to philosphers, or those studying religion and theology, buts its clarity and scope ensures it will be accessible to anyone who has considered what it means to be mortal.

Author: Costica Bradatan
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
ISBN: 1472525825
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 196

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What do Socrates, Hypatia, Giordano Bruno, Thomas More, and Jan Patocka have in common? First, they were all faced one day with the most difficult of choices: stay faithful to your ideas and die or renounce them and stay alive. Second, they all chose to die. Their spectacular deaths have become not only an integral part of their biographies, but are also inseparable from their work. A "death for ideas" is a piece of philosophical work in its own right; Socrates may have never written a line, but his death is one of the greatest philosophical best-sellers of all time. Dying for Ideas explores the limit-situation in which philosophers find themselves when the only means of persuasion they can use is their own dying bodies and the public spectacle of their death. The book tells the story of the philosopher's encounter with death as seen from several angles: the tradition of philosophy as an art of living; the body as the site of self-transcending; death as a classical philosophical topic; taming death and self-fashioning; finally, the philosophers' scapegoating and their live performance of a martyr's death, followed by apotheosis and disappearance into myth. While rooted in the history of philosophy, Dying for Ideas is an exercise in breaking disciplinary boundaries. This is a book about Socrates and Heidegger, but also about Gandhi's "fasting unto death" and self-immolation; about Girard and Passolini, and self-fashioning and the art of the essay.

Author: Todd May
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1317488482
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 128

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Book Description
The fact that we will die, and that our death can come at any time, pervades the entirety of our living. There are many ways to think about and deal with death. Among those ways, however, a good number of them are attempts to escape its grip. In this book, Todd May seeks to confront death in its power. He considers the possibility that our mortal deaths are the end of us, and asks what this might mean for our living. What lessons can we draw from our mortality? And how might we live as creatures who die, and who know we are going to die? In answering these questions, May brings together two divergent perspectives on death. The first holds that death is not an evil, or at least that immortality would be far worse than dying. The second holds that death is indeed an evil, and that there is no escaping that fact. May shows that if we are to live with death, we need to hold these two perspectives together. Their convergence yields both a beauty and a tragedy to our living that are inextricably entwined.Drawing on the thoughts of many philosophers and writers - ancient and modern - as well as his own experience, May puts forward a particular view of how we might think about and, more importantly, live our lives in view of the inescapability of our dying. In the end, he argues, it is precisely the contingency of our lives that must be grasped and which must be folded into the hours or years that remain to each of us, so that we can live each moment as though it were at once a link to an uncertain future and yet perhaps the only link we have left.

Author: Travis Timmerman
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1000216748
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 353

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Book Description
Exploring the Philosophy of Death and Dying: Classical and Contemporary Perspectives is the first book to offer students the full breadth of philosophical issues that are raised by the end of life. Included are many of the essential voices that have contributed to the philosophy of death and dying throughout history and in contemporary research. The 38 chapters in its nine sections contain classic texts (by authors such as Epicurus, Hume, Nietzsche, and Schopenhauer) and new short argumentative essays, specially commissioned for this volume, by world-leading contemporary experts. Exploring the Philosophy of Death and Dying introduces students to both theoretical issues (whether we can survive death, whether death is truly bad for us, whether immortality would be desirable, etc.) and urgent practical issues (the ethics of suicide, the value of grief, the appropriate medical criteria for declaring death, etc.) raised by human mortality, enabling instructors to adapt it to a wide array of institutions and student audiences. As a pedagogical benefit, PowerPoints, discussion questions, and test questions for each chapter are included as online ancillary materials.

Author: Palle Yourgrau
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0190053968
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 233

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Book Description
The dead are gone. They count for nothing. Yet, if we count the dead, their number is staggering. And they account for most of what is great about civilization. Compared to the greatness of the dead, the accomplishments of the living are paltry. Which is it then: are the dead still there to be counted or not? And if they are still there, where exactly is "there"? We are confronted with the ancient paradox of nonexistence bequeathed us by Parmenides. The mystery of death is the mystery of nonexistence. A successful attempt to provide a metaphysics of death, then, must resolve the paradox of nonexistence. That is the aim of this study. At the same time, the metaphysics of death, of ceasing to exist, must serve as an account of birth, of coming to exist; the primary thesis of this book is that this demands going beyond existence and nonexistence to include what underlies both, which one can call, following tradition, "being." The dead and the unborn are therefore objects that lack existence but not being. Nonexistent objects - not corpses, or skeletons, or memories, all of which are existent objects - are what are "there" to be counted when we count the dead.

Author: Ingemar Patrick Linden
Publisher: MIT Press
ISBN: 0262543168
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 271

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Book Description
A philosopher refutes our culturally embedded acceptance of death, arguing instead for the desirability of anti-aging science and radical life extension. Ingemar Patrick Linden’s central claim is that death is evil. In this first comprehensive refutation of the most common arguments in favor of human mortality, he writes passionately in favor of antiaging science and radical life extension. We may be on the cusp of a new human condition where scientists seek to break through the arbitrarily set age limit of human existence to address aging as an illness that can be cured. The book, however, is not about the science and technology of life extension but whether we should want more life. For Linden, the answer is a loud and clear “yes.” The acceptance of death is deeply embedded in our culture. Linden examines the views of major philosophical voices of the past, whom he calls “death’s ardent advocates.” These include the Buddha, Socrates, Plato, Lucretius, and Montaigne. All have taught what he calls “the Wise View,” namely, that we should not fear death. After setting out his case against death, Linden systematically examines each of the accepted arguments for death—that aging and death are natural, that death is harmless, that life is overrated, that living longer would be boring, and that death saves us from overpopulation. He concludes with a “dialogue concerning the badness of human mortality.” Though Linden acknowledges that The Case Against Death is a negative polemic, he also defends it as optimistic, in that the badness of death is a function of the goodness of life.

Author: Patrick Stokes
Publisher: Indiana University Press
ISBN: 0253005345
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 290

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Book Description
“This impressive [anthology] succeeds admirably at demonstrating how the Kierkegaardian corpus presents . . . a philosophy of finite existence” (Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews). Few philosophers have devoted such sustained, almost obsessive attention to the topic of death as Søren Kierkegaard. Kierkegaard and Death brings together new work on Kierkegaard’s multifaceted discussions of death and provides a thorough guide to the development, in various texts and contexts, of Kierkegaard’s ideas concerning death. Essays by an international group of scholars take up essential topics such as dying to the world, living death, immortality, suicide, mortality and subjectivity, death and the meaning of life, remembrance of the dead, and the question of the afterlife. While bringing Kierkegaard’s philosophy of death into focus, this volume connects Kierkegaard with important debates in contemporary philosophy.