Lucretius (c. 99 BCE-c. 55 BCE) is the author of De Rerum Natura, a work which tries to explain and expound the doctrines of the earlier Greek philosopher Epicurus. The Epicurean view of the world is that it is composed entirely of atoms moving about in infinite space. The implications of this view are profound: the proper study of the world is the province of natural philosophy (science); there are no supernatural gods who created the world or who direct its (...) course or who can reward or punish us; death is simply annihilation, and so there is no next life and no torment in an underworld. Epicurus, and then his disciple Lucretius, advocated a simple life, free from mental turmoil and anguish. The essays in this collection deal with Lucretius's critique of religion, his critique of traditional attitudes about death, and his influences on later thinkers such as Isaac Newton and Alfred Tennyson. We see that Lucretius's philosophy is connected to contemporary philosophy such as existentialism and that aspects of his thought work against trying to separate the sciences and the humanities. Lucretius: His Continuing Influence and Contemporary Relevance is the title of a 2009 conference on Lucretius held at St. John Fisher College, when many of the ideas in these essays were first presented.--Publisher description. (shrink)

Lucretius (c. 99 BCE-c. 55 BCE) is the author of De Rerum Natura, a work which tries to explain and expound the doctrines of the earlier Greek philosopher Epicurus. The Epicurean view of the world is that it is composed entirely of atoms moving about in infinite space. The implications of this view are profound: the proper study of the world is the province of natural philosophy (science); there are no supernatural gods who created the world or who direct its (...) course or who can reward or punish us; death is simply annihilation, and so there is no next life and no torment in an underworld. Epicurus, and then his disciple Lucretius, advocated a simple life, free from mental turmoil and anguish. The essays in this collection deal with Lucretius's critique of religion, his critique of traditional attitudes about death, and his influences on later thinkers such as Isaac Newton and Alfred Tennyson. We see that Lucretius's philosophy is connected to contemporary philosophy such as existentialism and that aspects of his thought work against trying to separate the sciences and the humanities. Lucretius: His Continuing Influence and Contemporary Relevance is the title of a 2009 conference on Lucretius held at St. John Fisher College, when many of the ideas in these essays were first presented.--Publisher description. (shrink)

This paper identifies two possible versions of the Epicurean 'Symmetry argument', both of which claim that post mortem non-existence is relevantly like prenatal non-existence and that therefore our attitude to the former should be the same as that towards the latter. One version addresses the fear of the state of being dead by making it equivalent to the state of not yet being born; the other addresses the prospective fear of dying by relating it to our present retrospective (...) attitude to the time before birth. I argue that only the first of these is present in the relevant sections of Lucretius (DRN 3.832-42, 972-5). Therefore, this argument is not aimed at a prospective fear of death, or a fear of 'mortality'. That particular fear is instead addressed by the Epicureans through the additional premise (found in the Letter to Menoeceus 125) that it is irrational to fear in prospect an event which is known to be painless when present. This still leaves unaddressed the related fear of 'premature death', which is to be removed through the acceptance of Epicurean hedonism. (shrink)

In this paper, I draw on Heidegger’s phenomenology of “moods” (_Stimmungen_) to interpret loneliness as a diffused and atmospheric feeling-state that often undergirds the lives of older adults, shaping the ways in which they are attuned to and make sense of the world. I focus specifically on residents in long-term care facilities to show how the social isolation and lockdown measures of the COVID-19 pandemic dramatically intensified the mood. The aim is to shed light on how profound and totalizing the (...) experience has been for residents. Making use of Heidegger’s account of the affective “collapse” or “breakdown” (_Zusammenbruch_) of meaning, I argue that when older adults are functionally locked in their rooms for months at a time and cut off from the orienting routines and rhythms of the relational world, the result is a crumbling of the fundamental meaning-structures that constitute subjectivity. The global sense of abandonment and disconnection strips away the possibility for self-understanding, and residents are often left confused and abandoned to an existence that has been drained of meaning and significance. (shrink)

Aquinas often defends the possibility of the resurrection of the dead by appealing to the survival of the human soul between death and resurrection. Contemporary interpreters suppose that Aquinas does so because he thinks the continued existence of the human soul is metaphysically necessary for the identity of human beings over time. If the human soul perished at death along with the human body, then not even God could bring the same human being back to life—so Aquinas is supposed (...) to think. In this paper I argue that this widely held supposition is false. First I present the evidence from a neglected quodlibet question in which Aquinas argues that God can annihilate material substances, which include human beings, and then re-create them numerically the same. This question makes it clear that Aquinas thinks that continuity of nothing other than God’s power is metaphysically necessary for the identity of human beings over time. But this interpretation of Aquinas faces a number of objections. I answer two, one based on Aquinas’s supposed endorsement of the principle of non-repeatability, and another based on his account of the difference between eternal, aeviternal, and temporal existence. (shrink)

Humanists acknowledge the absolute finality of death: it is annihilation. One may question whether sense can be made of life after death. Even if sense can be made, one may ask what evidence exists to justify belief that there is any such life. With the rejection of eternal life, and hence any risk of eternal damnation, humanists may argue that there is nothing to fear in death. One could argue against Lucretius that if there were to be the required similarity (...) between pre‐birth and post‐death non‐existence, then he/she should regret the lack of pre‐birth existence rather than overcome unhappiness at the lack of post‐death existence. There are numerous things that matter, and that mattering is not undermined by death as annihilation. Human mortality places a block on eternal life, but not on eternities that may yet give meaning to our lives. (shrink)

Death is an undeniable fact of life. Whether it is a bad or feared thing is an important discussion that can be brought back to the ancient Greek philosophers. This article is primarily concerned with the discussion on what grounds Epicurus's thesis "death, is nothing to us; since when we exist, death is not yet present, and when death is present, then we do not exist," and to what extent satisfactory results are reached. Later, it tries to investigate how Lucretius, (...) who is regarded as the successor of Epicurus, derives the result of meaningless of fear of death from the symmetrical relationship between prenatal and post-mortem non-existences. Finally, it refers to the modern asymmetric approaches which argue that, contrary to Lucretius's claim, the relationship between these two periods of non-existence is not symmetrical, because there are serious differences between the later birth and the later death of people, given their deprivations. This article argues that death has a mystery that raises the anxiety that comes from the nature of death; however, it defends the idea that it makes a significant contribution to the meaning of life. (shrink)

The third book of Lucretius' great poem on the workings of the universe is devoted entirely to expounding the implications of Epicurus' dictum that death does not matter, 'is nothing to us'. The soul is not immortal: it no more exists after the dissolution of the body than it had done before its birth. Only if this fact is accepted can men rid themselves of irrational fears and achieve the state of ataraxia, freedom from mental disturbance, on which the Epicurean (...) definition of pleasure was based. To present this case Lucretius deploys the full range of poetic and rhetorical registers, soberly prohibitive, artfully decorative or passionately emotive as best suits his argument, reinforcing it with vivid and compelling imagery. This new edition has been completely revised, with a considerably enlarged Commentary and a new supplementary introduction taking account of the great amount of new scholarship of the last forty years. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:The Last Puritan: A Memoir in the Form of a NovelChristopher PerriconeThe Last Puritan: A Memoir in the Form of a Novel, by George Santayana; edited by H. J. Saatkamp and W. G. Holzberger; xli & 744 pp. Cambridge: MIT Press, 1994, $50.00.In 1936, Irwin Edman reviewed The Last Puritan for the New York Times. It was a sympathetic review. However, Edman was not blind to the novel’s (...) fundamental weakness: it is driven by ideas, “essences,” rather than characters, ones you might hate or love: “... this is a poet’s novel and philosopher’s tale.... If the characters do not come to life, they live as themes dramatized and as ‘human persuasions.’”This year Harold Bloom wrote in The Western Canon that canonical works are those works which deserve re-reading. As a novel, The Last Puritan does not deserve re-reading, as Tom Jones, The Trial, or Huckleberry Finn, do. But as a philosophy “not argued but presented as a picture” (Edman), The Last Puritan may be among Santayana’s best works. Yes, one reads and re-reads The Last Puritan because one wants to know the ideas of America’s great philosophical poet. Without the philosophy to support the novel, I am not sure it would have a reason for being. One is not interested per se in Santayana’s plot or characters, their friendships and failures, Oliver and Jim, their deaths, or Mario, his paganism and love of life. Rather one wants to be enchanted by [End Page 186] Santayana’s poetic voice; one wants to know what Santayana thinks about the play of spirit and matter and how “the genteel tradition” had so much promise and yet had gone bad. And these are, indeed, in principle, the very same reasons why one reads and rereads Plato, Lucretius, or Dante.The critical edition, put together by Saatkamp and Holzberger, with an introduction by Irving Singer, is a first-class piece of work. It is everything a Santayana scholar would want or need. Singer’s introduction provides the reader with a sound and well-researched background on Santayana and Oliver’s story, and anticipates some problems of aesthetics the reader will face, e.g., the problem of character development. Unlike me, Singer thinks Santayana’s “idealizations” bring vitality to character: “Far from being desiccated types, the great characters in fiction give one a sense of individuality that often seems more natural to us than what is found in nature itself” (p. xix). Notwithstanding my disagreement with Singer, his presentation is well thought-out and plausible.The “Editorial Appendix,” written by Saatkamp and Holzberger, is impeccable. In the “Notes to the Text” they provide the scholar or the curious reader with a marvelous wealth of information. They run down and support with convincing evidence every allusion in the novel. In the “Textual Commentary,” they provide a statement of textual principles and procedures, a description and development of the text, and an explanation of how the critical text was established; in effect, after one has read the product, one can then read about the process by which the product was brought about. Naturally, there are also lists of emendations and variants.As a philosophical novel, I recommend The Last Puritan to anyone who believes that “... what the realm of essence, in its mute eternity, chiefly adds to our notion of nature is the proof that nature is contingent. An infinite canvas is spread before us on which any world might have been painted. The actuality of things is sharpened and the possibilities of things are enlarged. We cease to be surprised or distressed at finding existence unstable and transitory. Why should it have been otherwise? Not only must our own lives be insecure, as earthly seasons change, but perhaps all existence is in flux, even down to its first principles. Dum vivimus, vivamus. Everything, so long as it recognizably endures, is free to deploy its accidental nature, and we may lead the life of reason with a good grace, harmonizing as well as possible our various impulses and opportunities, and exploring the realm of essence as our genius may prompt” (Santayana, “A General Confession... (shrink)

Lucretius argues that death does not harm the person who dies. Harm could occur only if a person’s future non-existence were harmful. But one’s future non-existence is no more harmful than one’s non-existence before birth. Since a person is not harmed by lacking existence before birth, one is not harmed by lacking existence after dying.

Cosmopolis A Review of Cosmopolitics -/- 2015/3-4 -/- Editorial Dominique de Courcelles & Paul Ghils -/- This issue addresses the general concept of “spirituality” as it appears in various cultural contexts and timeframes, through contrasting ideological views. Without necessarily going back to artistic and religious remains of primitive men, which unquestionably show pursuits beyond the biophysical dimension and illustrate practices seeking to unveil the hidden significance of life and death, the following papers deal with a number of interpretations covering a (...) wide field extending from belief to theory, from emotions to concepts, from the wisdom of personal experience to the most sophisticated doctrines. Spirit and spirituality are indeed many-faceted notions. They may refer to the intricate world of the interacting spirits which inhabit living beings in animistic traditions, without excluding a “grand force” linking human beings within a dynamic whole on which their very existence rely . They also bear upon more atomistic and either/or approaches of Western philosophy, which have become embodied in Cartesian dualism against a monotheist background, to the point of freezing the essence of individuals and culminating in the extreme individualism that characterizes our contemporaries. However, this equally refers to the opposite conception of materialism, across times and cultures, from ancient India and Greece (Cārvāka, originally known as Lokāyata, or some Buddhist doctrines for the former, Democritus or Lucretius for the latter) to more contemporary materialistic schools, whether modern or postmodern. -/- The following papers look at the contrasting forms of the philosophy and spirit of the human factor set into a whole, with no artificial disjoint between the psychical and the physical levels, as Wittgenstein put it: “And how can a body have a soul?”. This approach is not unrelated to the notion of anthropocene examined in a recent issue of Cosmopolis, with provides another comprehensive framework open to a spiritual life emerging from the very environment that generated it. -/- *** The first section of this issue was edited by Dominique de Courcelles, director at the National French Research Centre (CNRS), whom we wish to thank for collecting relevant studies relating to the religious and political questions, with a view to focusing on the war of ideas inevitably waged behind images, concepts and perceptions, taking an asymmetrical approach. To the extent that they are mindful of global/local interactions and include representations, opinions and beliefs, such disciplines as philosophy, philology, history and social sciences can provide useful studies accounting for new practices in geopolitics and a fair diplomacy. -/- In her introduction, Dominique de Courcelles first poses the question of how the religious and political spheres interrelate, with their corresponding religious demands and humanistic values. She then suggests that the right question today may be breaking with the philosophy of human rights concerned with the defense of human beings against the hazards of arbitrary politics or the instrumental use of religion, in favour of a fair philosophy of humankind, a new humanism. This would consist in recognizing a common loyalty of all towards one interhuman, not only interstate community, to protect it from both the autonomy demanded by individuals and the instrumental use of minorities. -/- Considering the fact of diversity, so important today in terms of both politics and religion, Abdelhai Azarkan looks at the conditions under which tolerance could obtain the double status of right and duty. He revisits to two philosophers, John Locke and Voltaire, who thought about it from the historical reality of religious wars. The former made tolerance into a right, basing his analysis on the political-legal level, while the latter saw tolerance as a duty, from an analysis based on ethical-political criteria. -/- Mathieu Guidère examines what he calls semantic denominationalism, a term which implies religious attributes and identities, whichever national loyalties or personal belonging they may have at the same time. Since the early 2000s, thie phenomenon has expanded tremendously, compounded by the “war on terror” and the over media-oriented terrorist actions. Denominational expressions act as formal names for ordinary and high-profile players in domestic and foreign policies of democratic states. These systems reveal a receding secularization, while the powerful comeback of religious identities signals the failure of nation-states and the weakening of the humanist spirit. -/- Barbara De Poli retraces the history of a contemporary jihadism claiming its Islamic essence and asserting the truth of genuine coranic principles via the war on infidels, with a view to restoring the Caliphate. After defining the term jihad, she shows that even if this contemporary jiadism is spreading in the Muslim world, it radically departs from Islamic law and the received use of the term jihad, in so far as it is rooted in the early radical thinking of Islamic ideologues in the 20th century, starting with with Hassan al-Banna, the founder of the Muslim Brotherhood. This current has been fueled by by international conflicts since the outbreak of the war in Afghanistan, in which the so-called Western countries bear a major responsibility. -/- Abderrazak Sayadi starts from the Tunisian experience to ask the question of humanist values and democracy within the relationships between the religious and political spheres. As a historian of religion, he is brought to demystify certain islamic principles and to paying attention to the reform of law, seeing the separation of religion and politics as a precondition to a successful democratic gamble and the establishment of a renewed humanism. -/- Dominique de Courcelles reminds us that getting a better knowledge of narrations and words makes it possible to better understand how logical and rhetorical thinking works for those who wage an asymetriccal war, re-enchanting and mystifying the world to better take control. As soon as 1932, an exchange of letters between Einstein and Freud made it clear that, in order to free man from fatality and war, education understood as culture was fundamental. Such illustrations as the exécution of Oussama ben Laden and the Caliph’s speech in Mossoul show that a premiminary analysis of images and words is essential to a fair diplomacy conducted by people from civil society, whose culture and wisdom allow justice and force to speak together and better resist war. -/- Marcel Boisard thinks that on the day the guns fall silent, exhausted by war, we will not return to the state borders that have prevailed for a century as an outcome of the Sykes-Picot agreement of 1916. It is time to prepare the “day after”, which will be a huge challenge. To this end, a summit of Middle-East nations is urgently needed to globally decide the fate of those peoples. On the condition that we know who the enemy is and accept to name it, to understand the history of the countries, groups and alliances, and to question any false or self-interested sense of certainty. -/- *** In the second section, Paul Schafer provides the author’s experiences to explain how culture, from the artistic to the biological, has the power to to open the doors to spirituality, from the inner self to the global environment. He asks himself whether a relative permanence of spirituality can arise from the specific moments that characterize it. Laurent Ledoux synthesizes the conclusion of a symposium held on 22 January 2015 on the links between philosophy and management, on the basis of the spiritual dimension conceived as “natural” and the answers it may suggest to the issues that face the organizations in a “contemporaniversal” world. Jacques Rifflet makes that question in a secular perspective, based on the wellsprings of personal commitment before it can be caught by any religious creed or scientific theory. In this sense spirituality, in alliance with reason, both inspires human consciousness and illuminates its destiny. Sami Aldeeb asks himself whether Islam can be reconciled with human rights. Caught between the belief in an absolute and final Word descended from the sky, and evidence showing that any religion is the creation of a given culture and a society situated in time and space, the Makkan and … contexts et médinois call for differentiated, if not opposite answers and exegeses. Bernard Carmona provides the outline of a dialogical framework, which is known to be a feature of debates between the various philosophical schools of classical India, exemplified here by the transdisciplinary perspective of debates within a Buddhist context. *** The articles not focused on the previous topic include a study by Landry Signé on China’s strategy, competing with the United States to control African resources. The author deals with the specific case of China’s rapprochement with Southern Sudan since Sudan was broken up. In the last paper, Goran Fejić and Rada Iveković, return to the essential role that women should play, and comments upon the role of some international legal instruments related in particular to the elimination of all forms of discrimination. The perspective is transnational and transethnic and is based on secular criteria, as regards nation-building and more generally society-building. Considering the persistence of widespread violence, whether in times of armed conflict or in times of peace, the question remains whether it is possible to fully implement rights and justice instruments. (shrink)

I defend two major theses: (i) because the dead no longer exist, the dead cannot be harmed or wronged; and (ii) because the dead cannot be harmed or wronged, it is irrational to care about the future postmortem state of our reputations. I explain away common intuitions that the dead can be harmed by pointing to our ability to imagine ourselves in the place of a dead person. When we imagine ourselves in the place of a dead person, we exploit (...) a third person perspective that is simply not available to a dead person. (shrink)

Lucretius points out a puzzling asymmetry in our attitudes towards our prenatal non-existence and our post-mortem non-existence. Normally, we view birth as a happy occasion, and death as a sad event. Some philosophers argue that these asymmetry in our attitude is justified by the A-theory of Time, which reflects the common sense way of thinking about time, and so they discredit the B-theory of Time. In this paper I critically examine these claims and argue that this belief is (...) false. Our attitude is neither justified nor discredited by anything which is in debate between the A-Theory and the B-theory of time. Thus the existence of this asymmetry does not favor one theory over the other, and the dispute between the two theories will have to be settled on other grounds. (shrink)

This book is a concise, clearly written, and rigorously argued discussion of the main question regarding the metaphysics of death. In defending the view that death can harm the person who dies, Jack Li refutes Epicurean and Lucretian arguments that death cannot harm us and that it is irrational to fear death. Epicurus held that a person can be harmed only when he exists. Because death is the end of a person’s existence, death cannot harm him. Therefore, death should (...) be “nothing to us”. Lucretius offered the following symmetry argument. No one is harmed by, and no one fears, prenatal non-existence. Postmortem non-existence is symmetrical to prenatal non-existence. Therefore, no one can be harmed by postmortem non-existence, and it is irrational to fear this state.To show that the Epicurean and Lucretian arguments are flawed, Li examines three different theories proposed by such philosophers as Thomas Nagel, Joel Feinberg, Jeff McMahan, and Fred Feldman. The first is the “desire thwarting” theory, which says that death can harm us because it thwarts our unconditional desire to continue living. The second is the “deprivation” theory, which says that death can harm us because it deprives us of the goods we would have enjoyed had we …. (shrink)

Lucretius argues that death does not harm the person who dies. Harm could occur only if a person’s future non-existence were harmful. But one’s future non-existence is no more harmful than one’s non-existence prior to being born. Since a person is not harmed by lacking existence prior to being born, it follows that one is not harmed by lacking existence after dying. There is thus no need to fear death’s sting.

Most of us, were we faced with a life threatening situation, would try to avoid it; we do not want to die. Yet Lucretius has argued that death can be ‘nothing to us,’ for when death has occurred we don't exist: we can't suffer something if we don't exist.If death can be a misfortune, what is the misfortune suffered, and who suffers it? The misfortune must be suffered by the person who dies, before death has occurred, otherwise – as Lucretius (...) points out – there is no subject to suffer the misfortune. But what kind of misfortune can the misfortune of death be, that a person can suffer it before he or she dies? This question provides the focus of the paper.Our attitudes towards death and life are determined in part by beliefs we have about a variety of things, for example, whether or not there is a life after death. As I shall assume that life ceases at death the attitudes towards death for which I seek explanations will not be universally endorsed; nor are the attitudes towards life, in terms of which the explanations will be given, universally endorsed. My project is not to defend a set of attitudes but to show that the set of attitudes towards life that I consider provide an explanation of a set of attitudes that some people have towards death. (shrink)

In the final chapter of his book, The View from Nowhere , the American philosopher, Thomas Nagel, writes as follows about death: We do not regard the period before we were born in the same way we regard the prospect of death, yet most of the things that can be said about death are equally true of the former. Lucretius thought this showed that it was a mistake to regard death as an evil. But I believe it is an example (...) of a more general future-past asymmetry... [Derek] Parfit has explored the asymmetry in connection with other values such as... pain. The fact that a pain is in prospect rather than in the past has a very great effect on our attitude toward it, and this effect cannot be regarded as irrational... [the former asymmetry] can't be accounted for in terms of some other difference between past and future nonexistence, any more than the asymmetry in the case of pain can be accounted for in terms of some other differences between past and future pains, which makes the latter worse than the former. Nagel is maintaining in this quote that it is rational for a person to view pains which he is apt to experience in the future in a manner different from the way in which he views pains which he has experienced in the past. Nagel is saying that it is rational for a person to think of his future pains as more undesirable than his past ones. And Nagel claims that there is a similar asymmetry between a rational person's attitude towards a past in which he did not exist and a time in the future when he will not exist. In Nagel's view, just as a rational person will think of pains which he will experience as more undesirable than pains which he had in the past, he will think of his not existing in the future as much more undesirable than his not having existed in the past. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Buddhist-Christian Studies 23 (2003) 21-32 [Access article in PDF] Re-Creating Christian Community:A Response to Rita M. Gross Donald W. Mitchell Purdue University In Rita M. Gross's well-written, insightful, and provocative paper entitled "Some Reflections about Community and Survival," Rita says: "I am challenging my Christian colleagues to consider what role Western religious concepts about the individual may have played in getting us into the current hyper-individualism. I also am (...) asking whether the Buddhist concept of interdependence might be very useful in providing tools with which to think about why this hyper-individualism cannot survive."In terms of Rita's challenge, one could make the generalization that the notion of the individual soul being saved or on a journey to union with God has certainly played an important role in Christianity. At the extreme in this regard, Thomas à Kempis even advised solitude and the actual avoidance of other people, seen by him to be distractions to the spiritual life. However, most Christians would see this advice as an unhealthy extreme, agreeing with Rita that solitude has a "valued role...in the context of social life, not a substitute for it" (11). It is much more common for Christians to see themselves as parts of the mystical body of Christ, and to believe that their authentic selfhood and discipleship are found in the context of fellowship and community life in the church.In what follows here, I will try to show how the notions of selfhood and discipleship are being defined in a particular re-creation of Christian community, which includes persons of other faiths. I have been asked to make my response from the perspective of my own Christian community, the Focolare, which focuses on the kinds of social, economic, and environmental issues that we have been discussing for the past three years. In so doing, I will also try to show how the Focolare's trinitarian vision of God, community, and the cosmos is a possible answer to the above-quoted question Rita asks about how interdependence might be an antidote to hyper-individualism. Along the way, I will raise issues that relate to other points Rita makes in her paper, and then address her conclusions at the end of my paper. Seeds of a New Christian Community The Focolare began duringWorld War II with a small group of young women, whose ages ranged from fifteen to twenty-five, living in the city of Trent, Italy. 1 At the center [End Page 21] of the group was Chiara Lubich, who was only twenty-three at the time. In May of 1944 Lubich's home was destroyed by bombs, and her family decided to leave the city. Lubich made the difficult decision to remain with her companions in Trent, where they would meet in the bomb shelters as often as eleven times each day. They would take with them to the shelters only the Bible, which they searched for guidance in that difficult situation. What they came to understand in those hours together and then put into practice became the basis for re-creating a Christian community, one that is sensitive to the social, political, and economic conditions that had produced the war in which they were caught.A foundational discovery for these young women was a collective and yet very personal experience, in the midst of the death and destruction of the war, that "God is Love" (I John 4:8). Their contemplation of the First Letter of John, as well as other parts of the Scripture, strengthened not only their belief in the existence of God, when many were doubting God's existence, but also their faith in the love of God for each one of them.Wanting to respond to this experience of God's love, they again found in Scripture that God does not seek just a response of individual prayerful sentiment or personal piety, but a response that includes doing God's will: "It is not those who say to me, 'Lord, Lord,' who will enter the kingdom of heaven... (shrink)

The study deals with some of the central issues concerning the notion of death as discussed in Theravāda (Pāli Buddhism) as well as Mahāyāna Buddhism. What is the sense that death is regarded as an instance of duḥkha (Sanskrit) or dukkha (Pāli)? The research claims that here, firstly, the word duḥkha/dukkha is used as an adjective (which means ‘unsatisfactory’) rather than a noun (which means 'pain' or 'suffering'). Secondly, by death, the Buddha did not mean the act of dying but (...) the experience of someone's death or the idea of death. The Buddha also talked about deathlessness as the goal. Here, deathlessness does not amount to accepting something eternal but developing a proper perspective towards death by meditations such as that on impurity ( аśubhabhāvanā ) and contemplation on death ( maraṇānussati ). If the cessation of the cycle of rebirths and re-deaths ( punarmṛtyu ) is the ultimate goal that the arhat (Sanskrit), or arahant (Pāli), achieves, then the same should apply to Tathāgata. In that case, the problem suggests itself: how could the question of Tathāgata’s existence after death be accounted for as an unanswerable ( avyākṛta )? The study opines that the reason behind this is the profound, immeasurable, unfathomable nature attributed to Tathāgata. The research also discusses the basic difference between the attitudes on death in Śrāvakayāna and Mahāyāna. Lastly, it deals with the question of whether termination of one’s own life is permissible in Buddhism under certain conditions. (shrink)

Abstract: The symmetry argument is an objection to the 'deprivation approach'– the account of badness favored by nearly all philosophers who take death to be bad for the one who dies. Frederik Kaufman's recent response to the symmetry argument is a development of Thomas Nagel's suggestion that we could not have come into existence substantially earlier than we in fact did. In this paper, I aim to show that Kaufman's suggestion fails. I also consider several possible modifications of his (...) theory, and argue that they are unsuccessful as well. (shrink)

Lucretius famously argued that if we think death is bad because it deprives us of time we could have had by living longer than we do, then when we are born must be bad too, since we could have been born earlier than we were, and so be deprived of that time as well. John Martin Fischer thinks Lucretius’s symmetry argument fails because we have a bias toward the future. I argue that Fischer’s approach does not answer Lucretius. In contrast (...) to Fischer, I think that we can show an objective difference between the time before our birth and the time after our death, which means that we are justified in adopting different attitudes towards them. I revise a point made by Thomas Nagel that while we might live longer than we do, we cannot exist earlier than we did and remain the same people throughout. (shrink)

James Warren, Facing Death, Epicurus and his Critics. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2004. Pp. viii, 240. ISBN 0-19-925289-0. $45.00. Reviewed by Thornton Lockwood, Sacred Heart University Word count: 2152 words ------------------------------- To modern ears, the word Epicurean indicates an interest in fine dining. But at least throughout the early modern period up until the 19th century, Epicureanism was known less for its relation to food preparation and more so, if not scandalously so, for its doctrine about the annihilation of the human (...) soul at death, its denial of human immortality, and its attempt to justify the claim that death should not be feared since "Death is nothing to us". Epicureans -- like many ancient schools of thought -- sought to establish an objective "morality of happiness" or rational teaching about right conduct which allowed its practitioners to arrive at a kind of well-being. Epicureans identified such well-being or happiness with "freedom from disturbance" taraci/a ), and insofar as the fear of death undermined such contentedness in life, they presented arguments against the claim that death was a bad thing. Put more concisely, Epicureans believe that, "if we think about death correctly, we think about living a good life correctly, and vice versa". But whereas other ancient thinkers -- most famously Socrates and his students -- had sought to cure the fear of death by positing an immortal soul which philosophy was to prepare for life after the death of one's body, Epicureans took the opposite route and argued that in part it was the longing for an impossible immortality that contributed to the fearfulness of death. JW has done both classicists and philosophers the service of presenting a detailed analysis of the philosophical arguments which Epicureanism -- as found principally in the sayings and correspondence of Epicurus, Lucretius' De Rerum Natura, and Philodemus' De Morte -- presented about facing death. As the book's title accurately reflects, the presentation of the arguments is organized in large part as a response to the criticisms which both ancient and modern thinkers such as Cicero, Thomas Nagel and Bernard Williams have made against the Epicurean belief about death. JW is principally concerned with the accurate presentation and fair evaluation of philosophical arguments. Much of his analysis will appeal to philosophers interested in the problem of death or the cogency of ancient ethical thought, but, as he also notes, questions about death and how to live a good life are hardly the problem only of philosophical specialists. "If any questions are worth pursuing, these are". Insofar as JW's task requires careful scrutiny of ancient texts, he also sheds light on the proper understanding of difficult Epicurean texts, especially in those cases where different passages from different Epicurean authors appear to be in tension.[[1]] For the aid of philosophers coming to Epicurus without the skills of classicists, JW translates all Greek and Latin texts into English; at the same time, all translations are accompanied by the passage in its original language. The citations and corresponding bibliography are extensive, covering not only the relevant works of contemporary philosophers such as Nagel, Williams, Feldman, and Parfit, but also the philological works of classicists writing on Epicureanism in English, French, Italian, and German. The volume concludes with a helpful index locorum. The Epicurean belief that "death is nothing to us" is meant to correct the mistaken beliefs which people have that generate a fear of death. But as JW acutely notes, precisely what is fearful about death is ambiguous. On his analysis, it could include at least four analytically distinct fears: 1) the fear of being dead ; 2) the fear that one will die ; 3) the fear of premature death ; and 4) the fear of the process of dying. JW claims that "there is no single Epicurean 'argument against death'. Rather, they had an armoury of arguments which could be deployed against the various different kinds of fear of death". Thus, JW organizes his book into chapters which consider the "armoury"of arguments made against each of these four fears. After an initial introductory chapter which analytically distinguishes the different fears of death, JW next devotes chapters to: the argument that, since humans are without perception of death and the process of death, neither should be feared ; the "symmetry argument" which seeks to prove that apprehension about the coming end of life is as irrational as apprehension that one's life did not begin earlier ; and the Epicurean analysis of what constitutes "completeness" in life. In these first four chapters, JW lays out all the arguments which the Epicurean makes against each of the four fears, considers counterarguments which have been made by ancient and modern authors, and then evaluates the overall strengths and weaknesses of each argument. A fifth chapter considers a slightly different argument, namely one which alleges that either the historical fact that Epicurus wrote a will or the Epicurean attitude towards suicide generate inconsistencies between Epicurean theories and actual Epicurean practice. Finally, a sixth chapter summarizes and evaluates as a whole the Epicurean project to rid humans of their fear of death. Although all of JW's analyses are thorough and detailed, let me focus upon his evaluation of some of the more central -- and more difficult to justify -- claims which Epicureans make to give a sense of JW's argumentation. With respect to the fear of being dead or not existing, Epicureans claim that since the atoms which make up a person dissipate upon death, then there is no person who could perceive any postmortem harm, and thus there is nothing to fear about death itself. Philosophers like Thomas Nagel have raised against this argument examples which appear to justify the belief that postmortem non-perceived harms are something in fact that should be feared.[[2]] For instance, there seems to be something fearful about the death of an individual who does not get the chance to see his or her children grow up, but such a scenario seems to be an example of something which "harms" that individual even though the individual is dead and incapable of feeling or perceiving anything. The case is related to the problem of dying before one's life is "complete," but a merit of JW's analyses of the different fears of death is that it shows that the Epicurean has two distinct arguments against the claim that such a scenario is fearful, one of which concerns the question of fearing something which happens after one's death, the other which concerns the question of fearing that one's life ends before it is complete. With respect to the first question, JW suggests that the source behind our intuition that premature death could be an unperceived harm is a "comparative" evaluation with a non-tragic death. For instance, it is not implausible to say that a child raised in a less developed country has been "harmed" in comparison to a child growing up in a country with adequate access to schooling and health care.[[3]] Even if the child raised in the less developed country never perceives the harm, in comparison to the life she or he might have lived elsewhere such lowered access to resources seems to be a "harm". But, although the case of children being raised with different levels of access to resources may have a place within the question of global justice, the case of such "unperceived" comparative posthumous harms fails as a counter argument to the Epicurean position. In the original example, it was thought that dying before seeing one's children grow up is an unperceived harm because we know of other individuals who have had that opportunity, and comparatively the former individual seems to be "harmed." One of the main problems with such a counter argument, according to JW, is that it ends up proving too much. Since one could imagine for almost every death a comparative case which was better, the counter argument makes almost every conceivable death a "harm" to the individual who died. In JW's words, "given the thought that death may rob us of goods we would have experience were we to die later, it is difficult to resist the thought that any death will fit this description". But the force of the counter argument is supposed to seize upon the case of a "tragic death" where someone is prematurely struck down before life is complete. If all deaths are tragic, none is. If the claim that death is to be feared because of unperceived harms in the case of comparative loss is unpersuasive, what about the claim that death is to be feared instead because it sometimes strikes before one has arrived at completeness or fullness in life? Solon famously claimed that we must "look to the end" and call no man happy until his life is complete; Aristotle picks up on Solon's remarks in part because eudaemonists have traditionally placed special emphasis on "completeness" as a criterion of a life well-lived. Should not all fear death because death can strike prematurely, before one has reached the various goals and stages of a life well-lived? JW persuasively argues that Epicureans were concerned with addressing the fear of premature death but that they countered such a fear on the basis of their understanding of completeness and pleasure. A complete life is a good life, but for the Epicureans, the good is pleasure and the highest pl. (shrink)

Social media is full of dead people. Untold millions of dead users haunt the online world where we increasingly live our lives. What do we do with all these digital souls? Can we simply delete them, or do they have a right to persist? Philosophers have been almost entirely silent on the topic, despite their perennial focus on death as a unique dimension of human existence. Until now. -/- Drawing on ongoing philosophical debates, Digital Souls claims that the digital (...) dead are objects that should be treated with loving regard and that we have a moral duty towards. Modern technology helps them to persist in various ways, while also making them vulnerable to new forms of exploitation and abuse. This provocative book explores a range of questions about the nature of death, identity, grief, the moral status of digital remains and the threat posed by AI-driven avatars of dead people. In the digital era, it seems we must all re-learn how to live with the dead. (shrink)

This short and shapely book amply delivers its main promise, to discuss and offer views on a handful of central issues concerning the nature and importance of death. It does this with dry humour, unyielding attention to clarity and conciseness, and simple but highly effective structuring throughout.An introductory chapter sets out what you will and what you will not get. It aims to defend the more or less pervasive preoccupation with metaphysics, and outlines the chapters to follow. Ch. 2 contrasts (...) animalism with the psychological view, comes down overall in favour of the former, but incorporates into it some of the teeth of the latter. In ch. 3 Johansson defends the termination thesis, or the view that with death we cease to exist. Ch. 4 considers Epicureanism about death. It gives the Epicurean a number of shots at defending the view that death is not bad, but concludes that even the best of these falls short. This is followed in ch. 5 by a discussion of Lucretius' symmetry argument – we do not regret not having been born earlier, so why regret that we shall not die later? The view put forward here is that our not being born earlier is bad, but, unlike death, bad in an ‘innocent’ way. In the final chapter Johansson asks whether we should be especially concerned about our own deaths, explores the links with reductionist/non‐reductionist debates, and concludes that whatever your stance here, special concern is irrational. For reasons of space I shall say no more about this last chapter, but I shall offer something on the others. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:If You’re Not Part of the Solution...Sarah GilesI worked on an island that lured people to their deaths. I have come to realize that there are certain resources that every population must have in order to continue to exist. Health care providers are needed if a group is to continue to reside in one place. Without nurses and doctors, people tend to refuse to go to a location or (...) choose not to stay. Perhaps if doctors like me refused to work in places where people have their basic human rights ignored, those places would cease to exist. It’s wishful thinking, but it’s the only way I can imagine the events of December 15th, 2010, could have been prevented. [End Page E11]Australia has a large offshore detention center on Christmas Island, a tiny dot in the middle of the Indian Ocean. Housed in a collection of prison–like facilities are men, women, and children who have come to an Australian Island claiming they are refugees. They have paid an average of $10,000 (U.S. dollars) to be smuggled by boat from nearby Indonesia and are then, usually, intercepted by the Australian navy or coast guard, and brought to the island to await processing. This processing can take two to four years and, even then, it can end with deportation. The asylum seekers spend years in a massively overcrowded and unstimulating purgatory.To say that I was not familiar with the political situation on the island would be a farcical under-statement. As a Canadian family doctor, I went to work on Christmas Island because of its exotic location and reputation for world–class SCUBA diving. It sounded like a dreamy place to do a locum. The little research I had done told me that there was a detention center on the island, but I had been told that I would only deal with those patients if they were sick enough to come into hospital. I didn’t imagine that I would end up feeling culpable for the deaths of 48 people who dreamed of restarting their lives in Australia.On December 15th, 2010, a rickety boat carrying approximately 100 asylum seekers somehow slipped past the navy and coast guard into the water just off of Christmas Island. The weather was foreboding and the waves were massive. As the boat approached the island, it lost power and, horrifically, smashed into the cliffs, leaving an estimated 48 men, women, and children to drown and an almost equal number in need of rescue and medical attention. My name was on the call schedule that day. All survivors were brought to the hospital. Our worlds collided.At the time, I thought it was good luck there was an extra doctor on the island that day. I was relieved that we were able to cope with the mass casualty situation and that only few survivors were sick or injured enough to require evacuation to the main land. Three years later, I wonder if the accident would have happened at all had we not been there.I had felt smug providing care in the public hospital, believing it was morally superior to working as a mercenary at the detention center. But I now realize that all of the health care providers had a role in allowing the tragedy to occur. What would have happened if all of the doctors refused to work with people held under those conditions? If that critical infrastructure of health care were not available on the island, the detention center could not be there. If the detention center weren’t there, the government would stop processing people there and perhaps desperate people would stop risking their lives to get to Christmas Island. Maybe the women and men who lost their children or the children who lost their parents would never have gotten on that boat. Maybe.Parts of that awful day stay with me. My job as a doctor prevented me from offering the compassionate care I wanted to provide and forced me to turn into a medical conveyor belt. When a young patient was laid in front of me, I assessed her, started... (shrink)

Discusses the symmetry argument in Lucretius and defends the Epicurean claim against objections by Nagel and Parfit. Concludes that while the argument is vulnerable to the objection (found in Nabokov) that treating our past and future non-existence symmetrically leaves open the possiblity of increasing our anxieties rather than eliminating them, it remains rational, on Epicurean grounds, not do to so. In the context of Lucretius's overall argument in DRN 3, it bolsters the claim that we do not have a (...) bias toward the future when we talk about states we do not experience. (shrink)

I begin by sketching the Epicurean position on death - that it cannot be bad for the one who dies because she no longer exists - which has struck many people as specious. However, alternative views must specify who is wronged by death (the dead person?), what is the harm (suffering?), and when does the harm take place (before death, when you’re not dead yet, or after death, when you’re not around any more?). In the second section I outline the (...) most sophisticated anti-Epicurean view, the deprivation account, according to which someone who dies is harmed to the extent that the death has deprived her of goods she would otherwise have had. In the third section I argue that deprivation accounts that use the philosophical tool of possible worlds have the counterintuitive implication that we are harmed in the actual world because counterfactual versions of us lead fantastic lives in other possible worlds. In the final section I outline a neo-Epicurean position that explains how one can be wronged by being killed without being harmed by death and how it is possible to defend intuitions about injustice without problematic appeal to possible worlds. (shrink)

Tous les enfants aiment les bulles de savon, ce jeu qui assume le caractère transitoire de tout ce qui est beau et précieux. Les adultes ne devraient pas qu'en sourire, mais aussi s'en réjouir: elles font réapprendre à aimer ce qui brille sans lendemain. Pierre Zaoui propose un petit traité sur la vacuité de l'existence, nourri du regard des artistes qui se sont emparés du motif exprimant tantôt la nullité de toute chose ici bas, tantôt le sceau de l'éternelle (...) souffrance. Loin de la Vanité à laquelle la tradition philosophique et théologique l'a souvent réduit, il voit dans cet objet parfait et éphémère, transparent et iridescent, la possibilité d'une très soutenable légèreté de l'être. La bulle n'est pas luxe dérisoire, elle interroge ce que désirer veut dire. Elle n'est pas déni de la mort, mais une manière de l'envisager autrement que sur le mode du pari ou de la tragédie. Car chaque bulle de savon célèbre les noces immémoriales de l'homme et de son ombre."--Page 4 of cover. (shrink)

ABSTRACT This article is a response to 'Fear of death and the symmetry argument', in this issue. In that article, the author discusses the above Lucretian symmetry argument, and proposes a view that justifies the existing asymmetry in our attitudes towards birth and death. I begin by distinguishing this symmetry argument from a different one, also loosely inspired by Lucretius, which also plays a role in the article. I then describe what I take to be the author's solution to the (...) original symmetry argument and explain why I am unpersuaded by it. (shrink)

Many philosophers still believe that metaphysically analytic sentences exist, where a sentence is understood to be metaphysically analytic if and only if it is true solely in virtue of its meaning. I provide two arguments against this claim and hence conclude that metaphysically analytic sentences do not exist. Still, some philosophers, however, hold out hope that epistemically analytic sentences exist, where a sentence is epistemically analytic if and only if an agent's understanding the sentence suffices for the agent to be (...) justified in believing that this sentence is true. One such philosopher is Paul Boghossian, whose so-called analytic theory of the a priori is intended to show how epistemically analytic sentences can explain our a priori knowledge of the truths about logic. His theory, however, relies on the dubious Argument by Implicit Definition. I provide an objection to this argument and hence conclude that Boghossian's analytic theory of the a priori fails to vindicate the notion of epistemic analyticity. Still, I concede that just because Boghossian's attempt to do so fails, it does not follow that the notion of epistemic analyticity cannot, in another way, be vindicated. (shrink)

This paper examines Aquinas’s epistemological treatment of the disembodied soul in order to reveal (1) its relationship to the person it once was, and (2) the nature and extent of its self-knowledge. I argue first that disembodiment entails not only loss of personhood, but severe restriction of one’s concept of self. Consequently, individual self-consciousness is minimized. By contrast, I argue that the soul’s knowledge of its nature is likely to be realized more perfectly in the separated state, not so much (...) because of freedom from the body as the infusion of pure intelligibles. Thus, the roles of these two types of self-knowledge (particular and universal) are reversed from the case of the embodied soul, where self-consciousness is an effortless concomitant to thought and self-knowledge requires a painstaking labor. I conclude by wondering whether the cognition enjoyed in the separated state has some utility for the soul’s future, re-embodied existence. (shrink)

The history of physician involvement in capital proceedings is longstanding and ripe with controversy and conflicts of ethical concerns. Previously one of us has written that the controversy is more appropriately characterized as a conflict of moral position rather than one of ethical dilemma.In hindsight, we believe that analysis, while true, does not capture the depth or complexity of the issue.Forensic psychiatric evaluations, including competency to be executed evaluations, are done with a clear understanding that no physician-patient relationship exists. Treatment, (...) however, is not so neatly re-categorized in large measure because it involves the physician’s active provision of the healing arts. (shrink)

Three years of work with more than twenty scientists and high-level specialists: here are revealed the modern proofs of the existence of God. For almost four centuries, from Copernicus to Freud via Galileo and Darwin, scientific discoveries have accumulated in a spectacular way, giving the impression that it was possible to explain the Universe without the need to resort to a god. Creator. And so it was that at the beginning of the 20th century, materialism triumphed intellectually. In a (...) way as unexpected as it is surprising, the pendulum of science has swung back in the other direction, with incredible force. The discoveries of Relativity, quantum mechanics, the expansion of the Universe, its thermal death, the Big Bang, the fine tuning of the Universe or the complexity of living things, have followed one another. This new knowledge came to dynamite the certainties anchored in the collective spirit of the 20th century, to the point that we can say today that materialism, which has never been just a belief like any other, is on the way to become an irrational belief. In a language accessible to all, the authors of this book retrace the history of these advances in a fascinating way and offer a rigorous overview of the new proofs of the existence of God. At the dawn of the 20th century, believing in a creator god seemed to oppose science. Today, wouldn't it be the opposite? An invitation to reflection and debate. (shrink)

The aim of this article is to generate knowledge about parents’ participation in life-and-death decisions concerning their very premature and/or critically ill infants in hospital neonatal units. The question is: what are parents’ attitudes towards their involvement in such decision making? A descriptive study design using in-depth interviews was chosen. During the period 1997-2000, 20 qualitative interviews with 35 parents of 26 children were carried out. Ten of the infants died; 16 were alive at the time of the interview. The (...) comparative method (grounded theory) was used to analyse the data. The analysis was carried out continuously and in parallel with data collection. Six categories were revealed by the analysis: indecision and uncertainty (ambivalence); information and communication; participate, but do not decide; seeming to be included; the parents’ child; and individual consideration. The findings appear to indicate that parents agree that they should not have the final word in decisions concerning their infants’ future life or death. Such a responsibility would put too heavy a burden on parents who lack the medical knowledge and the professional experience needed to make such a decision, and would be likely to lead to them experiencing strong feelings of guilt. The findings show that parents should be well informed and listened to during the whole decision-making process. Their primary concern was how nurses and physicians communicate with parents who are experiencing a crisis, and how this serious information is presented. (shrink)

Der vorliegende Artikel plädiert dafür, die meist auf die Aspekte Todesdefinition, -kriterium und -feststellung fokussierte Diskussion über die moralische (Un-)Zulässigkeit der Spende und Transplantation vitaler Organe aufzubrechen und beim Nachdenken darüber das zum Ausgangspunkt der Überlegungen zu machen, was mit dem Tod eigentlich verloren geht, nämlich das Leben. Nach einer Antwort auf die Frage „Was ist Leben?“ suchend wird hierbei aufgezeigt, dass Leben nicht auf das Vorhandensein gewisser beobachtbarer physiologischer Größen reduzierbar ist, sondern in seinem wesentlichen Kern nur mit den (...) Mitteln der Philosophie als der actus primus alles Lebendigen und das, was wir gemeinhin Seele nennen, erklärt werden kann. Auf Basis der so gewonnenen Erkenntnisse wird geschlussfolgert, dass die Entnahme vitalen organischen Materials aus einer Person, deren Gehirnaktivitäten ausgefallen sind, immer prämortal erfolgt und damit einen Verstoß gegen die Tote-Spender-Regel bedeutet. (shrink)

Feminist relational theory can provide a theoretical framework for understanding and affirming the agency of women Cambodian religious leaders; an agency that can be overlooked if one assumes it co...

The deaths of those on whom our practical identities rely generate a sense of disorientation or alienation from the world seemingly at odds with life being meaningful. In the terms put forth in Cheshire Calhoun’s recent account of meaningfulness in life, because their existence serves as a metaphysical presupposition of our practical identities, their deaths threaten to upend a background frame of agency against which much of our choice and deliberation takes place. Here I argue for a dual role (...) for grief in addressing this threat to life’s meaningfulness. Inasmuch as grief’s object is the loss of our relationship with the deceased as it was prior to their death, grief serves to alert us to the threat to our practical identities that their deaths pose to us and motivates us to defuse this threat by revising our practical identities to reflect the modification in our relationship necessitated by their deaths. Simultaneously, the emotional complexity and richness of grief episodes provides an abundance of normative evidence regarding our relationship with the deceased and our practical identities, evidence that can enable us to re-establish our practical identities and thereby recover a sense of our lives as meaningful. (shrink)

One of the central normative questions regards a decision between conflicting moral values. A decision of this nature is often required in disciplines such as philosophy, economics and law. According to common terminology, a decision between conflicting values reflects a balance of values, considerations or interests. Several types of questions arise in this context. One category includes substantive questions: which values exist, which considerations should be derived from these values, what is the degree of importance of these considerations, and which (...) principles should be established for deciding between conflicting considerations? Another category includes institutional questions: which individual or body should decide normative questions, and should the normative nature of the decision be manifest or concealed? This paper is an abstract of a book that considers general aspects concerning these questions. (shrink)

Angiogenesis, the generation of new blood vessels from pre‐existing vessels, is an integral component of wound healing, responses to inflammation and other physiologic processes. It is also an essential part of tumor growth; in the absence of new vessel formation, tumors cannot expand beyond a small volume. Although much is known about angiogenesis and its regulation, there is no overall theory that describes or explains this process. It is here suggested that the intracrine hypothesis, which ascribes to certain extracellular signaling (...) peptides (whether hormones, growth factors, DNA‐binding proteins or enzymes) a role in both intracellular biology and extracellular signaling, can contribute to a more general understanding of angiogenesis. Intracrine factors participate in angiogenesis in the following ways: (1) they can act within the cells that synthesized them (type I intracrine action), (2) they can be secreted and then taken up by their cell of synthesis to act intracellularly (type II intracrine action ), or (3) they can be secreted and internalized by a distant target cell (type III intracrine action). The parallels between the intracrine growth factor mechanisms cancer cells employ in stimulating their own growth and the mechanisms operative in endothelial cell proliferation during angiogenesis (“intracrine reciprocity”) are discussed. Collectively, these explorations lead to testable hypotheses regarding the regulation of normal and pathological angiogenesis, and point to similarities between tumor‐induced angiogenesis and tissue differentiation. BioEssays 28: 943–953, 2006. © 2006 Wiley periodicals, Inc. (shrink)

We have argued that it is rational to have asymmetric attitudes toward prenatal and posthumous non-existence insofar as this asymmetry is a special case of a more general asymmetry in our attitudes toward past and future pleasures. Here we respond to an interesting critique of our view by Jens Johansson. We contend that his critique involves an inappropriate conflation of the time from which the relevant asymmetry emerges and the time of the badness of death.

La morale est une création discontinuée. Elle n'est pas codifiable dans de gros livres moralisateurs. Elle n'est rien avant qu'une conscience humaine ne la suscite par des occasions qui la font exister en singularité ici et maintenant. Cet ouvrage désigne la morale non comme une manière possible d'agir que l'on devrait ou non confirmer par l'action mais comme la réponse de principe que donne, dans un réflexe mental, tel homme en prise à tel cas de conscience.

En 1974 Jacques Rancière examinait la leçon de marxisme donné par le philosophe Louis Althusser à un collègue anglais et en faisait l'occasion d'un bilan sur l'althussérisme lui-même. Althusser avait imposé dans les années 1960 l'idée d'un retour à la vraie pensée de Marx, en phase avec les formes nouvelles de la pensée structuraliste (ethnologie de Lévi-Strauss, psychanalyse lacanienne, archéologie du savoir de Foucault) mais aussi avec les nouveaux espoirs révolutionnaires qui secouaient la planète à l'heure des luttes de décolonisation (...) et de la révolution culturelle chinoise. Or les événements de 1968 avaient montré le total décalage de ce marxisme renouvelé par rapport aux aspirations portées par les mouvements de la jeunesse et aux formes prises par la mobilisation populaire. La pensée du renouveau théorique et politique s'était transformée en pensée de l'ordre. Mais aussi, dans le contexte de l'après-68, cette pensée de l'ordre ne pouvait trouver son efficacité qu'en s'exprimant dans le langage de la subversion. La Leçon d'Althusser s'attachait à dégager les conditions de ce renversement en examinant le coeur politique de la philosophie althussérienne, l'opposition de la science et de l'idéologie, à la lumière de l'histoire récente mais aussi à celle de la tradition ouvrière et révolutionnaire. Ce texte devenu introuvable est aujourd'hui réédité avec une préface de l'auteur qui en souligne l'actualité : le destin de cette pensée de la subversion devenue une justification de l'ordre existant n'est que le premier épisode d'un mouvement politique et intellectuel bien plus vaste. Des années 1970 jusqu'à notre présent nous avons été témoins d'une vaste contre-révolution politique et intellectuelle dirigée contre tous les acquis des mouvements populaires d'un siècle et contre toute idée d'émancipation. Or cette contre-révolution a continuellement recyclé à son profit tous les thèmes de la pensée marxiste et critique d'hier. La Leçon d'Althusser mettait en lumière le mécanisme fondamental de ce processus et anticipait en ce sens le travail poursuivi par Jacques Rancière jusque dans des livres récents comme La Haine de la démocratie et Le Spectateur émancipé. Ce travail est donc propre à aider à la compréhension du présent et à la reformulation d'une pensée de l'émancipation. (shrink)

This book focuses on a new world-view: the harmony existing between systems that are so strongly interdependent they behave as a single entity.

Based on a general thesis regarding the proper resolution of interpersonal conflicts, this paper suggests a normative framework for the distribution of scarce health resources. The proposed thesis includes two basic ideas. First, individual well-being is the fundamental value. Second, interpersonal conflicts affecting well-being should be resolved in light of several conceptions of fairness, reflecting the independent value of persons and the moral significance of responsibility of individuals for the existence of interpersonal conflicts. These ideas are elaborated in several (...) principles that are applied with respect to the distribution of scarce health resources. (shrink)

We are confronted by the clash of contradictory ideologies and a crisis of universal knowledge. Two major causes of this crisis are the erosion of common sense and a relativistic view of doctrinal development. Fr. Réginald Garrigou-Lagrange foresaw today's crisis and wrote keenly in defense of the classical Thomistic synthesis. His critiques of modern philosophy and theology, we are now able to see, were prophetic. This first-time English translation of his Le sens commun: La philosophie de l'être et les formules (...) dogmatiques addresss the relationship between common sense and both philosophy and faith; the proper defense for philosophical realism; the subordination and coordination of philosophical first principles; our natural capacity for knowing God's existence; and, at length, the problem of dogmatic development. (shrink)

Most contemporary interpreters of Aquinas think that he rejects the possibility of intermittent or “gappy” existence. Thus they think that the soul’s natural survival after death is a necessary part of Aquinas’s defense of the possibility of the resurrection. Yet this contemporary consensus rests on shaky foundations. For on the basis of a widely neglected quodlibet question, earlier interpreters of Aquinas as eminent as John Capreolus and Francis Sylvester Ferrara recognized that Aquinas reserves to God the power to annihilate (...) material substances, including human beings, and then re-create them numerically the same. If these earlier interpreters are right, then the contemporary consensus is wrong. But Adam Wood argues that they are not right. He attempts to vindicate the contemporary consensus by offering an alternative reading of Aquinas’s quodlibet on annihilation and re-creation, providing textual evidence of Aquinas’s rejection of the possibility of “gappy” existence, criticizing the reading given to this evidence by Aquinas’s earlier interpreters, and mounting a philosophical case against the possibility of “gappy” existence based on his preferred interpretation of Aquinas’s theory of the principle of individuation. In this paper I come to the defense of Aquinas’s earlier interpreters. Wood’s alternative reading of Aquinas’s quodlibet is impossible to square with the text itself. Close inspection of Wood’s textual evidence shows that some of the readings of Aquinas’s earlier interpreters are much more plausible than Wood allows, making his textual case much weaker than he admits. And his philosophical case against the possibility of “gappy” existence begs the question. (shrink)

Eschatology is the study of end things—death and what lies beyond. Nearly all religions tackle the topic in one way or another. Theologians debate the different concepts of death, interment rituals, funeral rituals, final judgment, and the afterlife. Traditional African religions are no exception. -/- However, among scholars, the subject of African eschatology has lacked consistency and a coherent view. African Eschatology presents the concepts of end things as they are viewed in Africa as a whole but focuses especially on (...) the perspective of the Igbo culture of southern Nigeria, using it as a lens through which to examine African religious beliefs more generally. -/- Author Aloysius N. Ezeoba explains that Igbo culture perceives death not as an ultimate end but as a transition to another stage of existence. Judgment is passed by the living, by deceased ancestors, and by deities, for only through successful judgment may the Igbo rejoin their family members in a peaceful afterlife. The profound impact of death on the behavior of the living is unmistakable. -/- African Eschatology fills the gap that presently exists in the scholarly exploration of African traditional religions. It thus serves as a guide for both enculturation and inter-religious studies and communication. (shrink)

In addressing the Lucretian symmetry problem, the temporal bias approach claims that death is bad because it deprives us of something about which it is rational to care (e.g., future pleasures), whereas prenatal nonexistence is not bad because it only deprives us of something about which it is rational to remain indifferent (e.g., past pleasures). In a recent contribution to the debate on this approach, Miguel and Santos argue that a late beginning can deprive us of a future pleasure. Their (...) argument is based on the claim that for birth or death to deprive a person of any value in life, the historically closest counterfactual situation that contains the value is such that the person begins to exist earlier or dies later. This is what they call the Historical Condition. However, the Historical Condition is untenable for several reasons. First, this condition substantially weakens the explanatory capacity of the deprivation account because it implies that most ordinary sorts of pleasures are not deprived by death. In addition, the Historical Condition is vulnerable to counterexamples. In particular, what they offer as a standard case of the deprivation of future pleasure due to a late beginning (what they call Seeing The Beatles), or some of its variants, can be used to falsify this condition. Finally, the Historical Condition is theoretically indefensible because it is based on a faulty analysis of deprivation. (shrink)

The time of the landscape is not the time when people started describing landscapes in poems or representing gardens in works of art: it is the time when the landscape imposed itself as a specific object of thought. This object of thought was constituted through quarrels about how gardens were to be arranged, through accounts of travels to solitary lakes and remote mountains, or through evocations of mythological or rustic paintings. Jacques Rancière retraces these narratives and quarrels, showing how they (...) gave rise to a form of sensibility capable of modifying the existing configuration of modes of perception and objects of thought. The time of the landscape is the time when both the harmony of arranged gardens and the disharmony of wild nature contributed to a revolution in the criteria of the beautiful and the meaning of the word ‘art’. It coincided with the birth of aesthetics, understood as a regime for the perception of and thinking about art, and also with the French Revolution, understood as a revolution in the very idea of what binds a human community. The time of the landscape was the time when the conjunction of these two upheavals brought into focus, however hazily, a common horizon: that of a revolution that no longer concerns only state laws or artistic norms, but the very forms of sensible experience. This brilliant and wide-ranging book will be of interest to students and scholars in philosophy, literature, the visual arts and the humanities generally, and it will appeal to anyone interested in critical theory and philosophy. (shrink)