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The Metaphysics of Death
This collection of seventeen essays deals with the metaphysical, as opposed to the moral issues pertaining to death. For example, the authors investigate (among other things) the issue of what makes death a bad thing for an individual, if indeed death is a bad thing. This issue is more basic and abstract than such moral questions as the particular conditions under which euthanasia is justified, if it is ever justified. Though there are important connections between the more abstract questions addressed in this book and many contemporary moral issues, such as euthanasia, suicide, and abortion, the primary focus of this book is on metaphysical issues concerning the nature of What is the nature of the harm or bad involved in death? (If it is not pain, wha is it, and how can it be bad?) Who is the subject of the harm or bad? (if the person is no longer alive, how can he be the subject of the bad? An if he is not the subject, who is? Can one have harm with no subject?) When does the harm take place? (Can a harm take place after its subject ceases to exist? If death harms a person, can the harm take place before the death occurs?) If death can be a bad thing, would immorality be a desirable alternative? This family of questions helps to fram ethe puzzle of why—and how—death is bad. Other subjects addressed include the Epicurean view othat death is not a misfortune (for the person who dies); the nature of misfortune and benefit; the meaningulness and value of life; and the distinction between the life of a person and the life of a living creature who is not a person. There is an extensive bibiography that includes science-fiction treatments of death and immorality.
443 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 1993
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October 17, 2022
Here's an interesting text for you to chew on during the Halloween season. Even if you know nothing about metaphysics, this would be a good place to see what it's like. The subject matter is everyone's concern, and so it will keep you engaged through the process of detailed philosophical analysis of one of the greatest mysteries of the universe--death.
This compilation, put together by Stanford University from seventeen metaphysical essays on the central subject of death, will not convince you of the existence of ghosts or an afterlife or anything of the sort. In fact, many of these writers have come to the conclusion that there is nothing waiting for us after the demise of the body, so they consider death an experiential blank. For a deeper dive into whether the soul exists or whether there is any preservation of consciousness after death, you'd have to check out Richard Swinburn and his followers, and of course Plato. What this book does attempt to do is help the reader demystify anxieties about our inevitable demise.
It is rational to have a fear of germs. Germs exist, and many germs can be harmful. It is prudent to take reasonable precautions against infection and spreading it to others. But if you cannot leave the house for fear of coming into contact with germs, this is pathologic. Such behavior is not compatible with the satisfaction of the needs of life, nor will the behavior avoid contact with any germs since they are ubiquitous. Similarly, Spinoza would argue that fearing death is irrational, because there are no measures one can take to permanently avoid death, and such fear interferes with the enjoyment and satisfaction of living.
The Epicurean view seems similar to that of Spinoza. In his paper entitled "The Evil of Death," Harry Silverstein uses a series of logic formulae to illustrate the Epicurean conclusion that if a prudential desire to continue living is part of human nature, then human nature is irrational. Suppose person A is asked by a psychiatrist to assign an "A-relative value" to whether or not she lives or dies. Perhaps she is in jail and feeling rotten because she is also withdrawing from heroin. But she has some pretty reasonable hopes that this too shall pass, and after all, things aren't so bad in jail--she is being fed decently well, she has shelter, and despite her recent drug habit, has just been told that physically she is still healthy. So person A very rationally rates her satisfaction with life on a scale of +10 to -10 as a +2 (with null being indifference to whether she lives or dies). But Silverstein's formulae logically demonstrates that you can't assign a value to the A-relative goodness of A's death. Therefore, what can a value of +2 intelligibly mean in the first place, since there is nothing against which to weigh such a value? You might be tempted to say that the human desire to continue living is self-evident, and can even be seen in the self-preservation behaviors of all life forms, and therefore needs no justification, but the Epicurean view says that such life and death choices are not even possible in principle.
The book does not suggest, however, that we shouldn't ever think about life vs. death, but rather that it may be counterproductive to have irrational assumptions about what these things mean for a person. Jeffrie Murphy states that to believe in an afterlife without a shred of evidence is just one example of how people avoid thinking about death. You don't have to think much about living life fully if you believe that you will simply move on after this life to where you'll be better off.
This seems to make sense, but even people who believe in the otherworld don't really consider death a simple act of moving, because they consider death a "bad" thing. Nobody who is sane is happy when children are murdered in a school shooting, for example. But if you do believe in an afterlife, then when someone dies "before their time," doesn't that mean they get to move on to a better place quicker? If that is correct, what's the problem?
That's because we define a person in such a way that their thoughts, actions, and existence transcend time. George Pitcher makes a good argument in his paper "The Misfortunes of the Dead" that persons can be attacked, harmed, and benefitted even after they are dead. And Silverstein reminds us of what the brilliant W.V. Quine says about four-dimensional objects. Spatially distant objects exist though they may not exist HERE, and temporarily distant objects exist though they may not exist NOW. We can say Elsa is the widow of Charles, though Charles is not around. And when Charles married Elsa, he certainly wasn't marrying his own widow!
With that in mind, consider the following fates of two authors: Tolstoy died at 87, while Keats died in his 20s. Somehow the idea that Tolstoy led a full life and brought us many masterpieces of literature makes his death more acceptable. What we mourn by the loss of a four-dimensional person is their potentiality. If you had a child taken away from you, physically moved across the world to another country, and you were never allowed to see them again, the spatial distance would be a brutal enough loss. But death compounds the issue by robbing the world of that child's potential. That's the reason for the controversy behind things like abortion. You may fear dying, but you don't necessarily lament the time when you didn't exist because you hadn't been yet born. Though that may be true, the idea of purposefully robbing a person of their potential to exist and to interact with the world and to leave their mark on us through their consciousness, thoughts, and behavior is a different matter entirely.
Some of the authors would reject my support of the philosophers (and even the TV show "Doctor Who") who emphasize that objects exist across space-time. Perhaps I'm not practicing proper metaphysics at all, only defending common sense experience in order to justify irrational beliefs about life and death. But I don't see why that should be the case. If we only approach things from three-dimensions, when we say A has the property P, we can only mean: A (at time t) has the property P. So then posthumous reference is not possible. From a three-dimensional view, you can't say Fred is (now) being eulogized at his own funeral, because Fred doesn't exist now. Therefore "Fred" fails to refer. Only a four-dimensional framework solves this problem.
In some of these papers, the writers seemed to set out wanting to "prove" through metaphysical analysis that our thoughts about death are in fact illogical. The authors seem to start out with the presumption that people think the way they do about death because of cultural and religious fallacy that is not intellectually justifiable or noble. But is that true? The authors don't seem to explore that question, which impugnes the wisdom of countless civilizations across time that incorporated some belief of an afterlife. So the ancient Egyptians, with their architectural, technological, and political genius, were not intelligent because they believed that this life was just a pit stop? Talk about hubris!
Furthermore, once the authors who try to support the Epicurean view reach the conclusion of their papers, they seem to forget what they wanted to say about death in the first place, that we should all chill out and stop worrying about some inevitable end. For after all, once we're dead, all that worrying won't matter to us anyway, whether we are in heaven or simply in an experiential blank. But you can see these writers coming to the realization that their words are kind of empty, that they've done nothing to explain the fact that people DO value life and consider death an evil, and in their final paragraphs, they sometimes even apologize for having said little of anything insightful. As Steven Luper-Foy says, "Even people who argue that dying is not a bad thing do not really seem to believe what they are saying."
Why is that? Well, I think that if one assumes that the fear of death is merely the result of confusion, of irrational thinking imposed on us by society, one is failing to adequately account for the full definition of what defines a "person." I have already established my issues with philosophers who do not consider people in a four-dimensional context. But I also think you cannot define what death is without including a metaphysical analysis of the soul. The philosophers in this book, for the most part, wanted to leave out any discussion of the soul and simply focus on whether death is an acceptable thing or a bad thing. But that is trying to prove something through negation, and ignores a fundamental component of the analysis--the question of whether or not we are immortal.
The editor does a good job, however, of balancing the book with a variety of viewpoints. What does not resonate with me intellectually may make perfect sense to others. There is a general self-awareness here that we do not have all the answers, and perhaps nowhere is this more evident than in the inclusion of one of Woody Allen's stage plays and in his quotes that introduce each of these papers. If you are not a Woody Allen fan, you might find this annoying, but it does provide some needed comic relief from this rather heady and sometimes gloomy material.
I really found the book to be an absolute pleasure. I think this book will help you engage your critical thinking skills in a way you too will enjoy. These papers tends to be a little easier for the layperson to read, but as always, the concepts require you to spend considerable time approaching the text slowly, pausing between pages to review your understanding of what you just read.
As a final remark, whether or not you agree with the various thinkers in this book, you can't help but be moved by the overall message--that we should live life to the fullest as if every day could be our last. That further means that we should think about how we want to be defined as a person and then live up to those values as much as we can with the time we have. And that, as they say, is worth taking to the bank.
The philosopher Palle Yourgrau sums it up best: "Being ourselves the future dead, it behooves us to engage (while we can) in serious philosophizing about death. And if we are thereby beckoned down the path of metaphysics we should not fear to tread it. It is indeed a narrow and treacherous way, but it is the only one there is."
This compilation, put together by Stanford University from seventeen metaphysical essays on the central subject of death, will not convince you of the existence of ghosts or an afterlife or anything of the sort. In fact, many of these writers have come to the conclusion that there is nothing waiting for us after the demise of the body, so they consider death an experiential blank. For a deeper dive into whether the soul exists or whether there is any preservation of consciousness after death, you'd have to check out Richard Swinburn and his followers, and of course Plato. What this book does attempt to do is help the reader demystify anxieties about our inevitable demise.
It is rational to have a fear of germs. Germs exist, and many germs can be harmful. It is prudent to take reasonable precautions against infection and spreading it to others. But if you cannot leave the house for fear of coming into contact with germs, this is pathologic. Such behavior is not compatible with the satisfaction of the needs of life, nor will the behavior avoid contact with any germs since they are ubiquitous. Similarly, Spinoza would argue that fearing death is irrational, because there are no measures one can take to permanently avoid death, and such fear interferes with the enjoyment and satisfaction of living.
The Epicurean view seems similar to that of Spinoza. In his paper entitled "The Evil of Death," Harry Silverstein uses a series of logic formulae to illustrate the Epicurean conclusion that if a prudential desire to continue living is part of human nature, then human nature is irrational. Suppose person A is asked by a psychiatrist to assign an "A-relative value" to whether or not she lives or dies. Perhaps she is in jail and feeling rotten because she is also withdrawing from heroin. But she has some pretty reasonable hopes that this too shall pass, and after all, things aren't so bad in jail--she is being fed decently well, she has shelter, and despite her recent drug habit, has just been told that physically she is still healthy. So person A very rationally rates her satisfaction with life on a scale of +10 to -10 as a +2 (with null being indifference to whether she lives or dies). But Silverstein's formulae logically demonstrates that you can't assign a value to the A-relative goodness of A's death. Therefore, what can a value of +2 intelligibly mean in the first place, since there is nothing against which to weigh such a value? You might be tempted to say that the human desire to continue living is self-evident, and can even be seen in the self-preservation behaviors of all life forms, and therefore needs no justification, but the Epicurean view says that such life and death choices are not even possible in principle.
The book does not suggest, however, that we shouldn't ever think about life vs. death, but rather that it may be counterproductive to have irrational assumptions about what these things mean for a person. Jeffrie Murphy states that to believe in an afterlife without a shred of evidence is just one example of how people avoid thinking about death. You don't have to think much about living life fully if you believe that you will simply move on after this life to where you'll be better off.
This seems to make sense, but even people who believe in the otherworld don't really consider death a simple act of moving, because they consider death a "bad" thing. Nobody who is sane is happy when children are murdered in a school shooting, for example. But if you do believe in an afterlife, then when someone dies "before their time," doesn't that mean they get to move on to a better place quicker? If that is correct, what's the problem?
That's because we define a person in such a way that their thoughts, actions, and existence transcend time. George Pitcher makes a good argument in his paper "The Misfortunes of the Dead" that persons can be attacked, harmed, and benefitted even after they are dead. And Silverstein reminds us of what the brilliant W.V. Quine says about four-dimensional objects. Spatially distant objects exist though they may not exist HERE, and temporarily distant objects exist though they may not exist NOW. We can say Elsa is the widow of Charles, though Charles is not around. And when Charles married Elsa, he certainly wasn't marrying his own widow!
With that in mind, consider the following fates of two authors: Tolstoy died at 87, while Keats died in his 20s. Somehow the idea that Tolstoy led a full life and brought us many masterpieces of literature makes his death more acceptable. What we mourn by the loss of a four-dimensional person is their potentiality. If you had a child taken away from you, physically moved across the world to another country, and you were never allowed to see them again, the spatial distance would be a brutal enough loss. But death compounds the issue by robbing the world of that child's potential. That's the reason for the controversy behind things like abortion. You may fear dying, but you don't necessarily lament the time when you didn't exist because you hadn't been yet born. Though that may be true, the idea of purposefully robbing a person of their potential to exist and to interact with the world and to leave their mark on us through their consciousness, thoughts, and behavior is a different matter entirely.
Some of the authors would reject my support of the philosophers (and even the TV show "Doctor Who") who emphasize that objects exist across space-time. Perhaps I'm not practicing proper metaphysics at all, only defending common sense experience in order to justify irrational beliefs about life and death. But I don't see why that should be the case. If we only approach things from three-dimensions, when we say A has the property P, we can only mean: A (at time t) has the property P. So then posthumous reference is not possible. From a three-dimensional view, you can't say Fred is (now) being eulogized at his own funeral, because Fred doesn't exist now. Therefore "Fred" fails to refer. Only a four-dimensional framework solves this problem.
In some of these papers, the writers seemed to set out wanting to "prove" through metaphysical analysis that our thoughts about death are in fact illogical. The authors seem to start out with the presumption that people think the way they do about death because of cultural and religious fallacy that is not intellectually justifiable or noble. But is that true? The authors don't seem to explore that question, which impugnes the wisdom of countless civilizations across time that incorporated some belief of an afterlife. So the ancient Egyptians, with their architectural, technological, and political genius, were not intelligent because they believed that this life was just a pit stop? Talk about hubris!
Furthermore, once the authors who try to support the Epicurean view reach the conclusion of their papers, they seem to forget what they wanted to say about death in the first place, that we should all chill out and stop worrying about some inevitable end. For after all, once we're dead, all that worrying won't matter to us anyway, whether we are in heaven or simply in an experiential blank. But you can see these writers coming to the realization that their words are kind of empty, that they've done nothing to explain the fact that people DO value life and consider death an evil, and in their final paragraphs, they sometimes even apologize for having said little of anything insightful. As Steven Luper-Foy says, "Even people who argue that dying is not a bad thing do not really seem to believe what they are saying."
Why is that? Well, I think that if one assumes that the fear of death is merely the result of confusion, of irrational thinking imposed on us by society, one is failing to adequately account for the full definition of what defines a "person." I have already established my issues with philosophers who do not consider people in a four-dimensional context. But I also think you cannot define what death is without including a metaphysical analysis of the soul. The philosophers in this book, for the most part, wanted to leave out any discussion of the soul and simply focus on whether death is an acceptable thing or a bad thing. But that is trying to prove something through negation, and ignores a fundamental component of the analysis--the question of whether or not we are immortal.
The editor does a good job, however, of balancing the book with a variety of viewpoints. What does not resonate with me intellectually may make perfect sense to others. There is a general self-awareness here that we do not have all the answers, and perhaps nowhere is this more evident than in the inclusion of one of Woody Allen's stage plays and in his quotes that introduce each of these papers. If you are not a Woody Allen fan, you might find this annoying, but it does provide some needed comic relief from this rather heady and sometimes gloomy material.
I really found the book to be an absolute pleasure. I think this book will help you engage your critical thinking skills in a way you too will enjoy. These papers tends to be a little easier for the layperson to read, but as always, the concepts require you to spend considerable time approaching the text slowly, pausing between pages to review your understanding of what you just read.
As a final remark, whether or not you agree with the various thinkers in this book, you can't help but be moved by the overall message--that we should live life to the fullest as if every day could be our last. That further means that we should think about how we want to be defined as a person and then live up to those values as much as we can with the time we have. And that, as they say, is worth taking to the bank.
The philosopher Palle Yourgrau sums it up best: "Being ourselves the future dead, it behooves us to engage (while we can) in serious philosophizing about death. And if we are thereby beckoned down the path of metaphysics we should not fear to tread it. It is indeed a narrow and treacherous way, but it is the only one there is."
June 28, 2017
One cannot stoop to the level of taking seriously a philosophical anthology on death with Woody Allen quotes every fifteen pages. Then he threw in Tolstoy and Joyce for good measure. When did Stanford stoop to the level of hiring editorial staff upon middle school completion? I knew things were bad out West, but good Hiram Abiff is this deplorable.
April 15, 2018
I'm not going to sit here and pretend I understood everything I read or didn't dread picking it up to continue reading. One thing I enjoyed, and sometimes found funny, was how most essays seemed to argue with other essays/philosophers featured in earlier chapters. Most often I felt like I was reading in circles and had trouble keeping track of it all, but I'm glad I struggled through it. I will think of death in less of a black and white way from now on.
I do have to say, as someone else mentioned, the Woody Allen quotes between most chapters were off putting.
I do have to say, as someone else mentioned, the Woody Allen quotes between most chapters were off putting.
Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews