Course Description:  The main subject matter of this course will be the concept or phenomenon of death where we will be reading and evaluating principally contemporary literature.

In the first half of the course we will discuss inter alia the following: our conception of the human soul; the onto-epistemology of death; common conception of death as being “mysterious”; death and literature (the case of Elias Canetti); the contemporary approach to aging and dying in our culture; characterization of life as fabulae; and the existential-hermeneutic philosophy (specifically, Martin Heidegger’s view) regarding death as the ultimate phenomenological limit.

In the second half of the course we will focus chiefly on the notion of “harm due to dying”.  We will start with a classical view presented by Epicurus (4th cent. B.C.E.) and study the contemporary reaction the his “harm argument”.  We will also briefly discuss the Ancient and Spinozistic approaches to death.  Another major issue we will talk about will be the concept of immortality.  We will examine the notion of immortality, and then consider the pertinent analyses and philosophically evaluate its desirability.

Reading material:  A course package will be available at Dereağzı Fotokopi Ciltevi.  The reader contains selected articles from the following books:

Donnely, J. (ed.) Language, Metaphysics and Death. New York: Fordham University Press, 1994.

Malpas, J. and Solomon, R. C. (eds) Death and Philosophy. New York: Routledge, 1998.

Fischer, J. M. (ed.) The Metaphysics of Death. Stanford, CA: Stanford University
Press, 1993.

Bradley, B., Feldman, F., and Johansson J. (eds) The Oxford Handbook of Philosophy
of Death. New York: Oxford University Press, 2013.

Grading:  You will write two papers for this course, each 5-8 pages long.  One of them will be submitted around the middle of the term and the other during the finals period.  There will be no in-class exams in this course.  (Notes: You will not get a passing grade if you submit only one of the required papers.  Also, you will lose points substantially for late submissions.  Your papers are expected to be academically adequate both content-wise and formally.)