Preface
Summary
No one died. The motivation for this book does not stem from personal encounters with what, too poetically, they call the grim reaper. There have been no premature deaths among people I have been close to, nor with those expiring closer to full term have I been up against the awfulness of dying, either because it has not been awful, or because I have been elsewhere, in another country. Perhaps I have, so far, been very lucky. Rather, it was in California in the mid-1980s that, in a much more abstract way, I first became interested in some of the topics discussed here. A lazy but uneasy summer in the Santa Barbara foothills when I first discovered Derek Parfit's Reasons and Persons. Reading, and soon after replying to, a provocative paper on a birth–death asymmetry by Anthony Brueckner and John Fischer. The finishing of a dissertation on Hume, and the need for something new. I worked on a longish paper on the evils of death, but set it aside, although always with the intention of taking it up again some day. Other projects have somehow been easier to address, and allowed me to put off this one without feeling too guilty about it. But they are also now finished. And time is running out.
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- Information
- AnnihilationThe Sense and Significance of Death, pp. ix - xiiPublisher: Acumen PublishingPrint publication year: 2008