The Philosophy of Death

When thinking about pain, it has a negative connotation with it. Pain is bad, pain is this horrible feeling that we never want to feel which creates this fear of it coming into our life. In relation to grief, pain is what comes with grieving. Therefore, that comes wit h  fear and negative thought s . However, when reading Michael  Cholbi  “Finding the Good in Grief”, he challenges that belief by arguing that pain is a “much more complicated context than we recognized”.    Pain is valued as an essential to humans ,  we must feel pain. A lot of people have a bad feeling about  pain  therefore when it comes, they don’t have a good experience . This is because i f you believe that the pain you will feel during grief or just feeling pain in general will be horrible, then th at  pain will be. According to  Cholbi , pain must be associated with a positive attitude. Once it is, pain won’t be that  awful  feeling that we all dread...

              One of the  benefits  of  being  a  member  of a  blogging  community  is  that you  get   to read  the  opinions  of your  peers on a subject .  Reading this blog and it comments has changed my opinion on some issues due to other people new insight on  the discussed topic.  Which is a good thing because it increases your knowledge of the material and shapes your stance on an issue.  Although there are some arguments which I have read and still disagree with them ; even though they well articulated and backed up with evidence.              An example of this would be Snowden “Grief and Selfishness”,in which he backs up Seneca claim that excessive grief is foolishness that is used to condone bad behavior.  He gives an example of a drug addict going back to drugs after the death of his father using it a...

From Letter 63 of Seneca's Letters, I disagreed with line 13, which he states "Our forefathers have enacted that, in the case of women, a year should be the limit for mourning; not that they needed to mourn for so long, but that they should mourn no longer.  In that case of men, no rules are laid down, because to mourn is not regarded as  honourable .  I disagree with this statement because grieving is a valuable part of the human experience because grief puts you in a state of self-knowledge, therefore making it unfair to allow women to grieve and not extending that right to men since men are just as human as women and children.  The part about the mourning period from this statement is disagreeable because in order to gain full strength from grief, the person that is grieving needs to be able to mourn  as long as  necessary.  From Letter 99 of Seneca’s Letters, I disagreed with line 3, which he states, “We hunt out excuses for grief, we would even ut...

Letter 99 from Seneca talks about how we are responsible for our own grief in the sense that we shouldn’t milk it and grieve excessively. He’s not wrong, but to label the human action of grieving as womanish to ungrateful is problematic in how we view how grief should be handled. Grief could be looked at as ridiculous or absurd if we go about it by giving ourselves excuses about uncalled for actions against another person or ourselves rather than somebody expressing themselves in whatever way helps them sleep at night. Thinking about this in the way that a wash cloth may be holding more water than another. But we also don’t want to wring ourselves out and tear the threads that hold us together. In the fourth section of Letter 99, Seneca explains how the loss of a friend should be handled by valuing what you had in past times. His reasoning is supported with how grieving would be thankless action from the lack of appreciation for what we once shared with that person. So, we should valu...

The main question that Michael Cholbi answers in his paper, "Finding the Good in Grief: What Augustine Knew that Meursault Could Not," is "Why Can Grief be Good for us?" And there are many different facets to this question that Cholbi explores; one of these is the topic of grief's painfulness. Cholbi gives the example of inoculation and how, when an individual decides to get a vaccine, he or she must endure some amount of pain in order to successfully be inoculated. The idea behind this is that the small amount of pain is worth it to endure because the benefit of being immune to a certain disease afterwards outweighs the amount of discomfort from the prick of the needle. Analogously, the amount of pain that a person receives from grieving pales in comparison to the act of not going through the process of grieving and, in turn, self-destructing (you commit suicide) because you didn't take the time to recover. From this perspective, grief is just a dilemma, an...

In letter 63 by Seneca, he talks about how we should not grieve when we lose a loved one.  People who grieve for a extended amount of time are just doing it for the attention and sympathy they may get from others.  He also talks how if we do lose a friend to death then we should be happy about it because the more friends we lose that means we can be happy that we actual had friends in our life and that we are better off than someone who only has one friend to lose.  These ideas from Seneca may seem strange to many people but Seneca was a Stoic.  That means that he believed that we should do away with the emotions of pain and hardship and only have emotions of happiness.  With grief comes sadness and pain and that is a reason why Seneca does not like people who grieve.  I like the idea of people doing away with all the emotions that cause people pain and hardship.  It is not necessarily eliminating those emotions but when you feel them you control them ...

Grief is an emotion that we all as humans will experience when we lose someone that we care about.  At times, grief may feel like an overwhelming feeling that will never subside, but is it possible to think that some good can come out of the pain of grief?  Michael Cholbi likens the trial of grief to that of the pain of a runner or athlete training for an event in the way that sometimes pain is necessary to achieve the desired result.  According to Cholbi, the pain of grief is something that we have to work through to get the better result.  To me, the better result may not be that your sadness or pain from loss completely goes away, but how you grow as a person from this difficult experience.      Grief can cause many people to sink or swim, but it is what you take away from this experience that shapes the very person that you want to be.  Say your wonderful mom dies and you are wrought with anger and frustration that someone so great could be t...

     According to Seneca in his letter 99 to Lucilius, grief is a selfish emotion that we feel when we experience loss of somebody that we care about.  To me, grief can take many forms and roles in people's lives, and selfishness is definitely one of them.  Some people when they experience loss choose to dwell in a state of withdrawal or character change that they solely attribute to grieving over the loss of somebody that they care about.  Seneca is right, though he may come off a little attacking, in calling these people selfish because you cannot use the death of someone else as an excuse to do whatever you want and just blame it on your grieving process.      Take a recovered drug addict of 20 years for example.  Say his father was his hero and was the main person that helped him to get and stay clean all those years of his life.  Suddenly, his father passes away and his son doesn't know how to handle his loss and turns back to...

As we begin to read and learn more about the ways that different cultures and places grieves, teaches us that truly there is no way that is right or wrong. The rituals, around the world, may seem normal or weird to ours or to others yet that is how those people grieve over death. In the reading "From Here To Eternity" by Caitlin Doughty we began to focus on how there are so many more rituals and traditions that places around the globe use. Before reading that book I never had an idea that people did have different traditions. The book studied upon the idea of how there really is no right or wrong way to grieve about your loved ones death. When your loved one's life comes to an end, I believe that you have a right to process what has happened however and also goes for the funeral procession. In a way death does change others in drastic ways. That once someone does pass away that people who were remotely close, that their life will change.

One argument Seneca makes in Letter 99 involves an analogy with medical remedies and different injuries; some medical remedies don’t apply to certain injuries, and, he claims, pleasure is not a proper remedy for grief: “But which is the more incredible or inhuman – to feel no grief at the loss of one's friend, or to go a-hawking after pleasure in the midst of grief?” My criticism of Seneca’s argument is that his remedy analogy is a rather weak one on its own, and other than that, Seneca does not really support his assertion that pleasure is not a good remedy for grief. Personally, at the next death in my family, I don’t plan to go on a drug-fueled bender or blow all my money on a round trip to the tropics, but his argument seems poorly supported, even if I agree with his ultimate stance. There is nothing inherently wrong with the use of analogies in philosophy, and in fact, they can be extremely useful for illustrating a concept by relating it to another concept of which the audi...

The passages from Lucretius are certainly interesting and in my eyes seem to be logical explanations for the soul. These epicureans do seem to believe in a soul, but Lucretius wants to figure out what happens to the soul in the general. What happens to the soul after our body dies? What happens to our mind or memory? There are questions with no true answers because we will truly never know  until we are dead. The body is the soul's cage and the soul grows with us. Or the soul could just be an idea, it's all in our head, our mind is what could be giving us morale. They say that we truly are not going to survive death. So why worry about dying if we don't go anywhere? Death can be terrifying. In my case death is somewhat terrifying because I don't want to be in some void for the rest of eternity, life seems pointless to me if all we were was a cage. So I ask how do you guys feel about death?

              Lucretius is a great Philosopher who writes about death. He says that our body and soul die together, meaning that our soul really is mortal. How could our soul live on without our body if they are connected?                Lucretius tells us that our body, mind, and soul all enter this Earth to live a life, and when it is time, die. While the mind and soul are one, it is mortal while on Earth. Our soul is always with us through night and day. We eat, sleep and breathe with our body and soul.                Once our vessel of a body decides it is time to leave Earth, it deteriorates and dies. Our soul moves along with our dead body because it doesn't have a solid shelter anymore. Our body needs a solid foundation to call home, but once that is over and done with, it's gone. Our soul only has one chance to live, so it won't somehow connect with a body in...

Is the soul mortal or immortal? According to Lucretius in  On the Nature of Things  Book III, our soul is a subject to death. Lucretius claims that the soul and mind enter our body when we are born. Therefore, if our soul was truly immortal then we should be able to remember things that happened before we are born. Lucretius concludes by arguing that when we are at the end of our life, not only does our body die, but our soul and mind die with it. Our soul does not live on after we die. And a new one is created when new life is created.   While I understand what Lucretius is saying about how our soul and mind is created when we are born. His other claim however seems farfetched. Lucretius argued that because our soul is immortal, we should have the ability to remember memories from before. The problem with that is souls are a part of someone’s identity. It is one of a kind and is created specifically for one individual when we are born. So, saying that we should hav...

Lucretius is a poet and philosopher who espoused the teachings of Epicureanism in his book De Rerum Natura (On the Nature of Things). Epicureanism argues that pleasure is good while religion is not and only atoms and void exist. In this class we did not read the whole book but a short excerpt which pertained to death and how there is no afterlife for humans. Lucretius thought that people were so afraid of death to the extent they could  not enjoy life instead they cling to superstitions and amass wealth. He does not believe that the soul or the mind will outlive the body because if they were entangled in life while would they be separated at death. He gives several examples to prove his point some are illustrative than others but they all convey the same point, the body has effect on the soul. A good quote that best sum one of his argument is “For indeed, since the body, which was, as it were, the vessel of the soul, cannot hold it together, when by some chance it is shattered ...

I would like to address a criticism I made in response to the Check-In Question for February 8, 2019: The Original Argument: Lucretius, On the Nature of Things, Book III, Verse 6 1. A disembodied eyeball cannot process the world. [A] 2. The mind could not be without a body, and without sensory stimuli. [A] 3. "neither without body can the nature of mind by itself alone produce the motions of life." [2] 4. "nor yet bereft of soul can body last and feel sensation." [1] 5. "the living powers of body and mind prevail by union, one with the other." [1, 2, 3, 4] 6. "when the whole protection of the body is undone and the breath of life is driven without, you must needs admit that the sensations of the mind and the soul are dissolved." [1, 2, 3, 4, 5] In other words, the soul is not immortal because the mind and the body are dependent on one another for survival, as evidenced by the uselessness of a disembodied eyeball and a mind withou...

The soul is  the spiritual or immaterial part of a human being.  Our soul coexists with our body but is immortal. According to the Same Body-Same Soul Principle, it states that the soul is always associated with the same body, during the earthly existence of that body. Once the body dies off, the soul goes into the afterlife. The soul is still living after the body has died.   Our soul grows with the body and mind. When we are young our bodies and mind are weak. As we get older, the mind gets stronger and wiser. The body is weakening with age, so this means the mind will decline as well. The mind is altered with age and begins to decay once the body is decaying as well.   The soul is what holds our personal identity to ourselves not our physical body. The soul is like a stockroom for our memories.  The soul collects experiences and information from the outside world and stores it with the mind.

The soul can be independent of the body because it acts independently when engaging in pure thought. Our conscious mental states are very different from our physical mental states. We as humans have sensations, thoughts, feelings, desires, beliefs, purposes, etc. Those come from our conscious mental state of mind. These are different from our physical state. For example, being able to measure or locate things physically, such as a doctor using his common sense to locate or measure something in the body. We can’t do that in a conscious state. We can’t, in the same way, measure out our thoughts, feelings, beliefs, hopes, so on. Physical states, you can only have physical properties like location, size, shape, weight, so on. For mental states you feel things such as pain, the taste of things, so on and so on. Our mental states are about things, we’re able to think in depth because of our mental state. For example, a fear of spiders, a desire for food, a thought about your grade. But, ...

A soul is defined as the immaterial essence, animating principle or actuating cause of an individual life.  According to the definition, a soul is a mortal thing that lives and dies with the body.  A soul is very hard to understand because it is something that you cannot see, which leads many people to believe that a soul lives forever.  This belief is wrong because in order for a soul to be immortal, its counterparts, which are the mind and body must be immortal as well.  Soul is a big part of a human being because although you can not touch or see it, your soul contains your emotions, your conscience, and your decision-making.  The reason your soul contains your ability to make decisions because your soul is intertwined with your mind in the way that it contributes to working the parts of the brain that control decision-making.  Another reason your soul is a part of personal identity is because it allows you to channel your emotions and open up personal t...

In A Dialogue on Personal Identity and Immortality, John Perry explores the two eponymous concepts logistically--in abstract terms, but with a stress on the tangible or the quantifiable and how these could lend credence to the idea of the survival of death, or not. In addition, as I see it, it is also an exploration of different common presentations of faith, or a lack thereof. This is significant philosophically because common presentations of ideology are an inevitability as long as the word 'common' remains subjective, but I do not think it is a point of particular contention to assert that majority opinions arise, if not from direct contact and conformity pressures or someone merely being convinced by discourse, then they arise from a convergent evolution of ideas. Convergent evolution is no coincidence; it is different people applying the same logical mechanisms to arrive at the same conclusion, only in different contexts. This is a big part of what lends inter-subjectivi...

We went deeper into our discussions on death in class after reading A Dialogue on Personal Identity and Immortality. The book makes us think about the idea of souls, and offers the reader two different perspectives on them. On one hand, you have Gretchen Weirob who is not a beliver in our souls being connected to us and does not believe in any sort of afterlife. You also  have Sam Miller, who is trying to convince Gretchen of some sort of afterlife throughout the story by saying our souls live on after our bodies are dead.  Gretchen says that since we only have access to our material bodies, we are not able to claim when a sould is around us because it is considered to be something immaterial. I personally agree with Sam's next claim that our bodies can express certain psychological characterisitcs we have like our emotions, so there is a connection of our bodies and souls. Gretchen is right about how we cannot be 100% certain of souls existence due to them not having a phy...

For much of recorded history over the past 2000 years, the average human has been preoccupied in life with what happens to their body, and what happens to their soul.  Of course people are concerned with their physical well being for most of their lifetime because we are all trying to live the healthiest and longest lives that we can. However, throughout time people's character and moral value has, for the most part, been judged on their soul and the good or bad ways that we as humans lead our lives.  Though our bodies are critical to our life here on Earth, the soul of a person and its quality caries more value than anything else a person can possess. Non believers in a soul will try to argue the existence or relevance of this integral thing that we all carry, but the idea of soul is more about helping and influencing us to make good decisions and to serve as a guiding compass for all of us throughout life to help us be the best people that we can be.  What those who d...

When talking about death it is not uncommon to mention souls and believing in souls. In A Dialogue on Personal Identity and Immortality written by John Perry, the characters Gretchen Weirob and Sam Miller are in debate relating to the proof of personal identity and sameness of soul. Weirob states her opinion that there is no personal identity for the reason that there is no proof stating we hold one soul. Miller disagrees saying that there is no proof of human bodies holding multiple souls. I agree with Miller and his argument from the first chapter of the book. There are ways to identify people and objects by characteristics. Without the characteristics then how can someone identify a person or object with no visual aid? Agreeing with Miller, the idea of having one soul in our body for our entire life is engraved in our minds. Having Weirob question that idea leaves me with more questions. A part in the book that stood out the most to me is the argument by Weirob saying “...t...