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Death

Shelly Kagan · 2012 · Long (over 350 pages)

4.0 from 3 reviews · 51 views

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What it is

Based on Kagan's popular undergraduate course at Yale, this book examines death in two parts. The first is metaphysical: whether we have souls, what the arguments are, including those in Plato's Phaedo, for the soul's immortality, and what personal identity theory implies about when we die and whether we could survive death. Kagan defends a physicalist view on which a person is a body capable of functioning in certain ways. The second part asks about value: why death is bad for the one who dies if they no longer exist to experience anything, answered by the deprivation account; Epicurus and Lucretius's arguments that death is nothing to us; whether immortality would be desirable; how the inevitability of death should shape the way we live; and the rationality and morality of suicide. The tone is conversational and the arguments carefully laid out.

Why read it

It is the most careful accessible treatment of whether death is bad for us and why, written as a patient teacher talks.

Where to start

Start with the chapter on the badness of death and the deprivation account, then go back to the metaphysics.

Reviews

  1. Nadia Haddad

    I am a palliative-care nurse and an Epicurean sympathiser, and Kagan argues against Epicurus with real respect. His deprivation account is the best explanation I have read of why death can be bad for the person who dies. The chapters on suicide are careful and not glib. I have recommended it to colleagues.

  2. Omar Farouk

    As a physician and a believer I found the first half too quick to dismiss the soul; Kagan's physicalism is argued rather than assumed, but the case for a soul gets a fair yet brisk hearing. The second half on the value of life and death is superb, and I use it in a bioethics reading group.

  3. Elin Lindqvist

    I read it on night shifts in the ICU. The book's chatty tone, which comes from its lectures, made heavy material bearable. What stayed with me was his question of whether we would really want to live forever, and his honest uncertainty about the answer.