Related Papers
LOOKING BACKWARD AT AND FORWARD FROM THE NOVUM: FRIENDLY OR INIMICAL TO LIFE? (2023, 7.530 words)
2023 •
Darko Suvin
On the one hand, there have started into life industrial and scientific forces, which no epoch of the former human history had ever suspected. On the other hand, there exist symptoms of decay, far surpassing the horrors of the later times of the Roman Empire. In our days everything seems pregnant with its contrary. Karl Marx, Speech at the Anniversary of the People's Paper Nun muss sich alles, alles ändern. [Now all, all has to change] Ludwig Uhland, Frühlingsglaube [Spring Belief, also lied by Schubert]
Nissen 2013 Beyond Innocense and Cynicism
Morten Nissen
Collected Philosophical Essays
The Business of Life and Death, Vol. 2: Politics, Law, and Society
2018 •
Giorgio Baruchello
With patient logic, comprehensive research, a courageous sense of purpose, and indeed a gentle sense of humour, this volume of Baruchello’s essays continues the work of John McMurtry, and fills in the unacknowledged missing pieces in the work of Martha Nussbaum, Hans Jonas, and Arthur Fridolin Utz, among others. Baruchello lays bare the frightening reality of how capital has controlled our understanding of knowledge, ethics, and meaning, to the detriment of the life-flourishing of peoples and environments. Yet his argument remains optimistic: he shows how the power of capital can be escaped, and how the life-ground of human goodness can replace it. Please note that all author's royalties are devolved to charity. (Cf. http://www.brendanmyers.net/nwpbooks/baruchello1.html) The sample provided here contains also the table of contents.
Two Folds, Three Spaces: Ethics and the Architecture of Life and Death
2017 •
Nathan Stormer
On one hand, life and death refuse tidy classification. On the other, life and death invoke absolute boundaries. I’ve become increasingly attuned to this contradictory refusal and demand to be bounded and view it as a motivating problem in rhetorics that assign value to life and death. Life and death are so overdetermined and conflicted yet so necessary to guide what is judged desirable and undesirable, that I started looking for anything simple and consistent that might explain how this contradiction is not a conundrum but rhetorically productive and that’s what I want to sketch in brief today. For that purpose, liminal states of being are the most revealing in that like water on wood, they bring out the grain, revealing rich veins and patterns that are barely visible otherwise. And few states are as revealing as persistent vegetative state (or PVS) where individuals may linger for years, exhibiting mild affective responses but no discernable inner life. Most are familiar with Terri Schiavo and others like her, Karen Ann Quinlan most likely. Their stories may seem exhausted and no longer disclosive, only contentious, but I want to engage with PVS because stories like these have been worked so hard. An estimated 10 to 35 thousand in the United States alone exist in PVS and the fraught nature of addressing this condition exposes what I consider to be nearly unbreakable features of rhetorics that work the contradiction, relying on life and death to defy our understanding while also insisting on being understood.
Death Studies Subversions on the border of life and death
Anna E. Kubiak
Filosofisk supplement
The Privation Theory of the Vices
2019 •
Sivert Thomas Ellingsen
Virtues and vices are very widely and naturally regarded as what Aristotle called hexeis – i.e., roughly, as character traits. However, recent empirical findings seem to show that agents rarely or never have or act on hexeis, creating a problem for standard forms of virtue ethics. After surveying the traditional account of hexeis and this recent challenge to it, I sketch out and defend what I call the privation theory of the vices. The privation theory, I argue, allows the virtue ethicist to accept the non-widespreadness of hexeis at a relatively low theoretical cost. More specifically, on the privation theory, the claim that agents rarely instantiate hexeis turns out to be equivalent to a moderate form of pessimism about our current moral situation.
A Delphic Introduction (Feb. 2019)
Christopher Collins
Philosophies
On the Subjective Value of Life
2023 •
Ognjen Arandjelovic
Claims or the implicit assumption of an inherent worth of life are pervasive and remain virtually unchallenged. I have already argued that that these outright moral dictats are thinly veiled vestiges of theological ethics which, following the removal of their theological foundations , remain little more than nebulous claims supported only by fear of the consequences of a challenge. In my previous work I have rejected an a priori claim of an objective life's worth, that is the worth that we should assign to others' lives, and elucidated a prin-cipled framework which gives rise to the said worth mediately, as a consequence of the experiences of its sentient environment. Herein I address the complementary question of the value of one's own life, that is the subjective value of life, and thus Camus's (in)famous view that "there is but one truly serious philosophical problem, and that is suicide". As before, I reject the inherency of a life's worth, showing it to be a contradictio in adjecto, and instead show how this worth too can in large part be seen to emerge from sentient experiences of the subject. Many of these are innately linked to experiences of other sentient beings as objects, thus erecting a framework which is both principled and thoroughly humane with Schopenhauer's 'loving kind-ness' running through it. Practically, my framework illuminates an understanding of suicide as a real-world phenomenon, helping those who remain living understand the deceased one's decision, and paving the way to answering questions such as when there should be an attempt to prevent suicide, and what means of suicide prevention are ethically permissible.
SHOFAR: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Jewish Studies
Life Against Death: Review Essay
2011 •
Bernard Harrison
This review essay, on the late Israeli novelist Aharon Appelfeld's novel "Blooms of Darkness", was published in SHOFAR: an Interdisciplinary Journal of Jewish Studies, in 2011. I include it here, along with an earlier essay, "Aharon Appelfeld and the Problem of Holocaust Fiction," as an act of homage to a man I met only once or twice, and knew only slightly, but whose work I admire immensely.
Transactional Analysis Journal
Existential Realities and No-Suicide Contracts
1996 •
Geoff Mothersole
