Hostname: page-component-cd9895bd7-gvvz8 Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-12-23T04:05:48.775Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false

PHILOSOPHICAL SUICIDE

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  21 December 2011

Get access

Extract

We often judge that death is bad for the person who dies – that my death, for instance, will be bad for me when it occurs. It is not easy, however, to explain, justify, or defend this judgment. As Epicurus argued more than 2000 years ago, death is ‘nothing to us’ because ‘when we exist death is not present, and when death is present we do not exist.’ (Letter to Menoeceus, 124–125)

Type
Research Article
Copyright
Copyright © The Royal Institute of Philosophy 2011

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

Camus, A.The Myth of Sisyphus, trans. O'Brien, Justin (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1975).Google Scholar
Epicurus, , Letter to Menoeceus, in Diogenes Laertius: Lives of Eminent Philosophers II, trans. Hicks, R. D., (Harvard: Harvard University Press, Loeb Classical Library, 1925).Google Scholar
Hume, D.Enquiries Concerning Human Understanding 3rdEdition, ed. Selby-Bigge, L.A. and rev. Nidditch, P.H. (New York: Oxford University Press, 1975).Google Scholar
Taylor, Richard. ‘Does Life Have Meaning?’ in Life and Death: A Reader in Moral Problems 2ndEdition, ed. Pojman, Louis P. (Scarborough: Wadsworth Publishing Company. 1999), pp. 111118.Google Scholar
Nagel, T. ‘The Absurd’ in Mortal Questions (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1979), pp. 1123.Google Scholar
Williams, B. ‘The Makropulos case: Reflections on the Tedium of Immortality’ in The Metaphysics of Death, ed. Fischer, J.M. (California: Stanford University Press, 1993), pp. 7192.CrossRefGoogle Scholar