The Power of Death: Retroactivity, Narrative, and Interest
David Bourget (Western Ontario)
David Chalmers (ANU, NYU)
Rafael De Clercq
Jack Alan Reynolds
Learn more about PhilPapers
In Robert L. Perkins (ed.), International Kierkegaard Commentary: Prefaces/Writing Sampler and Three Discourses on Imagined Occasions. Mercer University Press (2006)
This paper contrasts Kierkegaard's response to Epicurean indifference to death in "At a Graveside" with attempts in contemporary analytic philosophy to overcome Epicurus' challenge to the rationality of fearing death. I argue that attempts by Nagel, Pitcher, Feinberg etc. to show why death is a harm rely on a narrative understanding of life that, according to Kierkegaard, is unavailable with respect to one's own death. Kierkegaard's approach, by contrast, involves becoming phenomenally co-present with one's own death via a specific mode of "earnest" contemplation.
|Keywords||Kierkegaard Harmfulness of Death " At a Graveside" Epicurus Narrative|
|Categories||categorize this paper)|
Setup an account with your affiliations in order to access resources via your University's proxy server
Configure custom proxy (use this if your affiliation does not provide a proxy)
|Through your library|
References found in this work BETA
No references found.
Citations of this work BETA
Patrick Stokes (2010). 'See for Your Self': Contemporaneity, Autopsy and Presence in Kierkegaard's Moral-Religious Psychology. British Journal for the History of Philosophy 18 (2):297 – 319.
Similar books and articles
Daniel Berthold-Bond (2011). The Ethics of Authorship: Communication, Seduction, and Death in Hegel and Kierkegaard. Fordham University Press.
Shelly Kagan (2012). Death. Yale University Press.
David James (2011). The 'Self-Positing' Self in Kierkegaard's The Sickness Unto Death. The European Legacy 16 (5):587 - 598.
Ben Bradley (2004). When is Death Bad for the One Who Dies? Noûs 38 (1):1–28.
Steven Luper (2004). Posthumous Harm. American Philosophical Quarterly 41 (1):63 - 72.
C. Yates (2011). Refiguring the Essential Word: The Work of the Imagination in Ricoeur's Late Apprenticeship. Philosophy and Social Criticism 37 (2):229-237.
Christopher Wareham (2009). Deprivation and the See-Saw of Death. South African Journal of Philosophy 28 (2):246-56.
Patrick Stokes (2011). Naked Subjectivity: Minimal Vs. Narrative Selves in Kierkegaard. Inquiry 53 (4):356-382.
Kai Draper (2004). Epicurean Equanimity Towards Death. Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 69 (1):92–114.
Sorry, there are not enough data points to plot this chart.
Added to index2009-02-02
Recent downloads (6 months)0
How can I increase my downloads?