Death and Happiness Class
From Alfino
Contents
Lecture Notes: Death and Happiness Class, April 17, 2007
Introduction
- The Philosophy Bird,
- St. Jerome, and
- UVA Killings
Some Initial Distinctions
- Distinctions among: Thinking about (preparing for) your own death, Responding to the death of others, helping others with their experience of death (their own or others). Critical Quesitons: Which way to does the inference go? from our own understanding of death to the others, right?
- Distinct yet overlapping concerns in different religious traditions treatment of death: 1) Islam and Christian; 2)Tibetan Buddhist. (Montaigne's point about the need to conquer death.)
- Distinction between cognitive knowledge of death and experience knowledge, felt responses. Critical Question: Are our responses to death trainable? What is the goal of such traning? Does it come with the pursuit of wisdom?
Montaigne, That to Study Philosophy is to Learn to Die
To the Best of Our Knowledge
Dave Meyers, psychologist: Durability bias. We're bad at predicting our future happiness: tenure study, physical tragedies, (cancer patients), mentions his own impending hearing loss (a kind of death). Trick knee vs. broken leg.
Smiling segment - Kind of tangential to our concerns, but any thoughts?
