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Suicide

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  05 November 2010

R. F. Holland
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Extract

I am concerned with the subject as an ethico-religious problem. Is suicide all right or isn't it; and if it isn't, why not?

The question should not be assumed to be susceptible of an answer in the way the question whether arsenic is poisonous is susceptible of an answer (which would be the answer to the question). Moreover in the case of arsenic the question what it is, and the question whether it is poisonous, are separable questions: you can know that arsenic is poisonous without having analysed its nature. But to know or believe that suicide is objectionable is to have analysed its nature or construed its significance in one way rather than another.

Type
Papers
Information
Royal Institute of Philosophy Supplements , Volume 2 , March 1968 , pp. 72 - 85
Copyright
Copyright © The Royal Institute of Philosophy and the contributors 1968

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References

page 72 note 1 Suicide (trans. Spaulding and Simpson) (London, 1952), pp. 41–2Google Scholar.

page 73 note 1 Ibid., p. 43.

page 73 note 2 Ibid., p. 44.

page 74 note 1 Phaedo, 64A.

page 74 note 2 Phaedo, 62A.

page 75 note 1 Phaedo, 62B.

page 76 note 1 Phaedo, 107G.

page 77 note 1 Gorgias, 469B.

page 79 note 1 Scott's Last Expedition (London, 1935), vol. i, p. 462Google Scholar.

page 81 note 1 Foundation of Morals.

page 81 note 2 Lectures on Ethics: Suicide.

page 81 note 3 World as Will and Idea, § 69.

page 82 note 1 Orthodoxy: The Flag of the World (London, 1909Google Scholar).

page 85 note 1 Lael Tucker Wertenbaker, Death of a Man (New York, 1950), p. 10Google Scholar.

page 85 note 2 His remark about the suicide wiping out the world might otherwise seem to be no more than a solipsistic muddle.