Is a Fear of Dying Common?

One of the three most popular open courses of internationally renowned schools, the popular star professor Kagan, takes us to think rationally about the most important topics in life. To understand death is the preciousness of life.

Yale University Open Class: Death

One thing is certain: in the end we will all die.

One of the three most popular open courses of famous international schools, with a total of hundreds of millions of hits.

The image of Shelley Kagan, a Yale professor who is most like a naughty boy, wears jeans and canvas shoes, sits cross-legged on the podium and talks with everyone. He has become a popular "star professor" among domestic young people.

Death is the "limitation of life" and the reference of life. Only by knowing death can the preciousness of life be manifested. Facing death and thinking about death means thinking about life.

Death is our most important issue, because all life points to the end, and we are closer to the end every day. This is the most certain thing in all forms of life.

But death is not a pleasant topic, we will try to leave it behind. How many times do we stop and think about it, we just stayed in this world for a short time and never returned after leaving? We routinely place ourselves in "immortal illusions" or use some unthought-out perspective as a comfort or haven.

As one of the three most popular open courses of internationally renowned universities, Professor Shelley Kagan's "Yale Open Course: Death" is a challenge. It challenges the habitual point of view, the challenge of burying heads in the sand like ostriches, and death. The habit of turning a blind eye, challenging the seemingly unproven logic, challenging the comfort zone of thinking, and inviting us to think systematically and rationally about the truth of death and life.

Rational death consciousness can bring positive life consciousness and life attitude. As the first person in the history of philosophy to heal the "trauma of death", the ancient Greek philosopher Epicurus proposed to live well before death, and to die well when death comes: to get used to believing that death is a thing It has nothing to do with us, because all good and evil are in the sense, and death is just a loss of feeling. Because of this, correctly recognizing that death has nothing to do with us makes us happy about the death of life. This realization does not add endless time to life, but liberates us from the desire for immortality. Come out. If a person correctly understands that termination of life is not terrible, for him, there is nothing terrible to live.

Shelley Kagan, Clark Professor of Philosophy at Yale University. He received his Ph.D. from Princeton University in 1982. Before teaching at Yale University in 1995, he taught at the University of Pittsburgh and the University of Illinois at Chicago.

The course "Philosophy: Death" taught by Professor Shelley Kagan at Yale University is one of the most popular open courses of internationally renowned schools on the Internet. It is also the earliest popular course of NetEase public courses.

In the video of the open class, Professor Kagan was wearing jeans and canvas shoes, sitting cross-legged on the desk, sitting on the podium and talking to a group of young people about the nature of life and death, dancing and dancing like a child. The human heart, known as the "Daxian", is highly sought after for its meticulous logic and appeal.

The first chapter considers death, the second chapter of dualism and physicalism, the third chapter of the existence of the soul, the fourth chapter of Descartes, the fifth chapter of Plato, the immortality of the soul, the sixth chapter of personal identity, the seventh chapter between the two theories, Choose Chapter 8 The Nature of Death Chapter 9 Two Amazing Words about Death Chapter 10 The Detriment of Death Chapter 11 The Eternal Life Chapter 12 The Value of Life Chapter 13 Other Features of Death Chapter 14 Facing Death Chapter 15 Suicide Chapter 16 Conclusion: Acknowledgements

| Chapter 1 | Thinking About Death

This is a book about death. But it is a philosophical work, which means that the topics we are going to discuss are different from those that other books on death might cover. So the first thing I want to do is talk about topics that we won't discuss. You may expect or hope that a book on death will discuss these topics, which is reasonable, but I will not discuss them, so you will immediately realize that this is not the book you are looking for.

Speaking of topics we will not discuss, I mainly think about psychological and sociological issues about the nature or phenomenon of death. For example, a book on death might discuss the process of death in detail, or people slowly accept the fact that they will eventually die. We will not talk about these. Similarly, we will not talk about the process of grief or bereavement. We will not discuss the funeral industry in the United States, or our annoying attitude towards death, or how we tend to avoid facing death. These topics are important, but we won't discuss them in this book.

So what will we discuss? We will discuss philosophical issues that arise when we start thinking about the nature of death, such as: What happened when we died? However, in order to start talking about this, we must first think: What are we? What kind of entity is a person? In particular, do we have souls?

At the beginning, I will explain that in this book I use "soul" as a philosophical term. I use the term "soul" to refer to something that is immaterial and completely different from our body. So the question we have to ask is, do we have an immaterial soul, that is, something that will survive the death of the body? If not, what does this mean for the nature of death? What happened when we died?

We will also ask: What are the requirements for survive my death? In fact, we have to ask, generally speaking, what does it mean to live? For example, what does it mean for me to live, to say to live tonight? This is roughly what I mean by asking this question. Sometime tomorrow afternoon, someone will be sitting at my computer writing this book, and of course I will assume (and hope!) That it is me. However, if the person who is typing here tomorrow is the same person who is typing here today, what exactly is the situation? This is a matter of personal identity in time. Obviously, if we want to properly think about death and survival, and the possibility of continued existence after my death, we must first understand the nature of personal identity.

The first half of this book will use most of the space to discuss the existence of the soul, the nature of death, and the possibility of survival after death, and then we will return to the question of value. If death is really the end, is it bad? Of course, most people will immediately think death is terrible. But why death is so bad is a philosophical mystery.

Now, I will try to make you feel a difficult part of death right away. Suppose I don't exist after death. If you think about it, you can hardly see why death is a bad thing for me. After all, when I die, death seems impossible to me: how can anything bad happen to something that doesn't exist at all? If death is not a bad thing to me after I die, how can it be a bad thing to me? After all, while I'm still alive, it looks like death is definitely not a bad thing for me!

Don't worry, I won't try to persuade you that death is not a bad thing. But we will see that it is a bit of work to know exactly where death is bad so that we can see how death can be a bad thing. (There is another question worth asking: Does more than one make death a bad thing.) Now, if death is really a bad thing, then you might ask, would immortality be a good thing? This is another issue we will be thinking about. Generally speaking, what we are asking is: How will the fact that I will die affect the way I live? What attitude should I take towards the fact that I will die? For example, should I be afraid of death? Should I be despairing about the fact that I die?

Finally, we turn to suicide. Many people believe that, given the value and preciousness of life, we never have a reason to commit suicide. After all, that is giving up the only life you can have. So, at the end of this book, we will examine the rationality and morality of suicide (or, perhaps, the irrational and immoral nature of suicide).

These are the issues we want to discuss. For those familiar with related philosophical terminology, it can be roughly said that the first half of the book is metaphysics and the second half is value theory.

There are two different ways to write a philosophical work, especially such an introduction. In the first way, you simply list the various positions you can choose, and argue from both sides, while you try to stay neutral. You don't stand on one side openly at the beginning, but avoid exposing the specific position you accept. This is the first way. But you can also take a very different path. To remind you, I will take the second path in this book. In the second path, you will tell the reader what ideas you accept, argue over them, and do your best to defend them. This is closer to what I do next. I will form and defend a specific line of thought. That said, I have a set of opinions on the issues that I will discuss, and I will try to convince you that they are correct in this book.

In order to help you quickly understand these points, I will first describe another set of points that are different from it, which is the point that many others accept. This common view contains many logical claims. Logically, you can believe some, but not all, of this set of propositions, and many people do accept them in their entirety, so I guess you are likely to believe at least some of them.

This common view is this. First, we have souls. In other words, we are not only flesh, we are not just pieces of meat and bones. On the contrary, we still have a part, maybe the core part. Something is not just physical, it is our spiritual and immaterial part. As I said, in this book I will call it the soul. Most people believe that there is a soul, maybe you also believe it. Most Americans believe that there is some kind of immaterial soul. This common view goes on to argue that, because of this immaterial soul, we are likely to be alive after death. Death is the loss of our body, but our soul is immaterial, so it will continue after we die. Of course, there are many things we can't understand about death, and death is the ultimate mystery. However, whether you believe in a soul or not, you may at least hope that a soul exists, because then you are likely to be alive after death. After all, death is not only a bad thing, it's scary enough to make us want to live forever. What a wonderful life would be. If there is a soul, there is at least the possibility of eternal life. In any case, we hope so-we are immortal souls-whether we know the truth or not. If there is no soul, if death is really the end, then things are so bad that our obvious, appropriate and universal response is to face the prospect of death with fear and despair. Finally, given that death is so terrible and life is so beautiful, it is never justified to give up your life. So, on the one hand, suicide is always irrational; on the other, it is always immoral.

As I said just now, these are common views about the nature of death. What I need to do next is to prove in this book that this set of views is quite wrong. I want to make you believe that there is no soul; I want to make you believe that eternal life is not a good thing; fear of death is not actually a proper response to death; death is not particularly mysterious; suicide in some cases May be both rational and ethical. I think the common imagination of death is quite wrong, and my goal is to make you believe it too.

Naturally, I hope you will agree with me by the end of this book. After all, I think the argument I'm defending is correct, and I very much hope you finally believe this fact.

But I also want to say that for you, the key is not to agree with me, but to think for yourself. After all, the most important thing I have to do is to invite you to think seriously about death, to face it and think about it in a way that most people have never done before. If at the end of the book you didn't agree with one of my claims, let it go. I'm very satisfied. Well, I won't be completely satisfied, but at least I will be very satisfied, as long as you really think about the arguments for both of these issues.

Before I start, let me say one or two more. First, I have explained that this is a philosophical work. Basically, this means that we will try to use our reasoning power to think carefully about what we can know about death, or what we can figure out. We will think of death from a rational perspective.

Therefore, I need to make it clear that there is evidence and argument that we will not use in this book, and that is to resort to religious authority. Of course, you may already believe in the afterlife, you may believe that you will continue to live after death, and you may believe in eternal life. Of course, you can trust all these things, because that's how your church teaches you. It's ok. My goal and intent is not to get you out of your religion or to oppose your religion. But I do want to make it clear that I will not resort to religious arguments in this book, whether it is the Apocalypse, the authority of the Bible, or what you believe in.

If you like, you can use this book as a huge hypothesis. If we have to think from a secular perspective, what conclusions will we draw about the nature of death? Compared to the authoritative answer given by divine revelation, using only our own reasoning thinking ability, what conclusions can we draw? If you happen to believe in the divine revelation, you might as well discuss it at another time, we just won't argue about it here.

Finally, I want to explain what "this is an introductory philosophical work" means: This means that the book does not presuppose any background in the topic, but this does not mean that it is easy to understand. In fact, some of these materials are difficult to understand, and some ideas may be difficult to grasp at once. In fact, if you have time, it would be helpful to read some parts twice. Of course, I don't really expect you to do this, but I want to remind you that philosophy is difficult to understand.

I also want to emphasize that "this is an introductory work" has a second meaning, that is, every topic we will discuss can be extended. They can all be questioned with much longer lengths, and beyond the arguments we will consider, there are always more in-depth arguments. Many of these arguments quickly become extremely complex, and cannot be discussed in such works. This is true for every topic we will examine.

So after reading it, don't think that my opinions on these topics are already conclusive. In fact, they are more like first words. But, of course, a preliminary view would be a good starting point. ^[1]