The one thing most certain about life is also one of the hardest to think about: that it will end. The mind has a tendency to recoil at the very thought of death. Holding this thought in view with clarity, courage, and sensitivity is very difficult. Over the ten weeks of this course, we will try to do just that.
We won’t do this alone. We will grapple with questions and answers offered up by a diverse group of thinkers, from ancient Greece, Rome, India, and China, and from the 20th and 21st centuries.
Among the questions we will ask are: Is death something we have reason to fear? Would an immortal life be desirable? (How) does death give meaning to life? And how might an encounter with death change a person’s perspective on life?
Week 0 (Jan 16/17/18): Organizational meeting
We get to know one another a little and go over various organizational matters so that we can hit the ground running the following week.
Week 1 (Jan 23/24/25): Epicurus and Lucretius, excerpts
The ancient Greek philosopher Epicurus argues that death shouldn’t trouble us. As long as we’re alive, death isn’t a problem, he says, and after we die, we won’t be there to experience the loss. The Roman philosopher Lucretius, one of Epicurus’ most distinguished followers, adds that we have no more reason to feel horror at the prospect of our non-existence after death than we do at the fact of our non-existence before birth.
Week 2 (Jan 30/31/Feb 1): Thomas Nagel, “Death”
The American philosopher Thomas Nagel challenges the Epicurean arguments that death is not so bad. Their arguments assume that something can only be bad for us if we experience its badness. Nagel argues that this assumption is unfounded and claims that death is bad because it deprives us of the goods of life.
Week 3 (Feb 6/7/8): Zhuangzi, excerpts
The Zhuangzi is a foundational text of Daoism and one of the wildest and most imaginative works of Chinese philosophy. We’ll read a series of excerpts that present death as one of many transformations in the world, and nothing to get overly stressed about.
Week 4 (Feb 13/14/15): Bernard Williams, “The Makropulos Case”
The British philosopher Bernard Williams shares Nagel’s view—although with different emphasis—that death deprives us of something genuinely valuable. But he adds a twist: not dying would be even worse. He writes about the “tedium of immortality”: there is no way that creatures like ourselves, with finite characters and interests, could enjoy an eternal life.
Week 5 (Feb 20/21/22): Nick Bostrom, “The Fable of the Dragon-Tyrant”
Bostrom spins a fairy tale about a land besieged by a fearsome dragon that demands a tribute of thousands of lives each day. Unable to defeat the dragon, the people simply come to accept their predicament. This is our present relationship with death, says Bostrom. But just as it becomes possible for the people in the fairy tale to develop a weapon that can defeat the dragon, so we might develop the technology to overcome age-related decline and death. Bostrom argues that we can’t develop this technology soon enough.
Week 6 (Feb 27/28/29): The Kaṭha Upaniṣad
Does a person continue to exist after death? In this sacred text from ancient India, a young boy comes before Yama, the embodiment of death, and asks to be taught the truth about death. What follows is a teaching about the nature of the self and how the true self transcends an individual life.
Week 7 (Mar 5/6/7): Samuel Scheffler, Death and the Afterlife (excerpts)
What difference would it make to the way you live if you knew that, shortly after your death, humanity would become extinct? Scheffler argues the difference would be considerable. If his intuition is right, it has interesting consequences for how we make sense of the meanings of our lives. In particular, Scheffler argues that the continuation of our own lives matters less than we ordinarily suppose, and that the continuation of the lives of others matters a lot more.
Week 8 (Mar 12/13/14): Martin Heidegger, Being and Time, Division 2, chapter 1
The chapter on death in Heidegger’s magisterial Being and Time is possibly the most influential treatment of death in the twentieth century—and the most challenging. Heidegger argues that human existence is fundamentally a “Being-towards-death”: our understanding of life and its meaning is shaped by our relation to our own mortality. The temptation to hide from a reckoning with our mortality is powerful but only by overcoming that temptation can we enjoy an authentic existence.
Week 9 (Mar 19/20/21): Denise Riley, Time Lived, Without Its Flow, postscript
The poet and philosopher Denise Riley composed a profound and searing meditation on her grief after the death of her son. The experience dislodged her from her ordinary experience of time, prompting a radical revisioning of the medium in which our lives unfold. In this week, we will also consider a number of other philosophers’ explorations of grief and the “paradox” that grief tends to lessen over time even though the reason for grieving—the loss of a loved one—doesn’t change.
Week 10 (Mar 26/27/28): Val Plumwood, The Eye of the Crocodile, excerpt
In 1985, the ecofeminist philosopher Val Plumwood was nearly killed by a crocodile in the Australian outback. Seeing herself through the eye of the crocodile, she saw that she was prey—an animal to be eaten like any other. That experience of being prey unsettled her sense of what it means to be a human animal—and confronted her in an unexpected way with her own mortality. We will close the course by reflecting on the way that mortality connects us to our status as animals—and connects us to other animals.