Lecture 1: Course introduction

What the Class Will NOT Cover:

  • Psychological/sociological aspects of death (e.g., grieving processes, stages of dying, funeral industry, societal attitudes).

What the Class WILL Cover:

  • Philosophical exploration of death, divided into two parts:
  • Metaphysics (First half): Nature of death, existence and nature of souls, personal identity, and survival after death.
  • Value Theory (Second half): Is death bad? Would immortality be desirable? Rational attitudes toward death, fear, despair, and suicide.

Prof. Kagan’s position:

  • No souls or immortality.
  • Immortality would not be desirable.
  • Fear of death is not necessarily rational.
  • Suicide can be morally and rationally justified under certain conditions.

Lecture 2: The nature of persons: dualism vs. physicalism

  • Central Question: “Could I survive death?” requires clarity on two key points:
    1. What am I? (What is a person composed of?)
    2. What does it mean to survive? (Understanding personal identity over time)
  • Philosophical Objection: The initial question seems self-contradictory—death is defined as the end of life, so “life after death” means “life after the end of life,” seemingly an obvious contradiction.
    • Clarification of the Question: To avoid confusion, restate the question as, “Might I exist after the death of my body?”
    • This avoids trivial contradictions and opens a meaningful philosophical inquiry.
  • Two Major Views on What a Person Is:
    1. Dualism: A person is composed of two fundamentally different substances — a physical body and an immaterial soul (or mind). - Implication: The immaterial soul could, in principle, continue existing after bodily death, thus allowing the possibility of life after death. - Clarifications:
      • Strict dualists usually identify the person primarily with the soul rather than the body-soul combination, making bodily death potentially survivable.
      • Dualism requires further investigation into:
        • Whether the soul exists.
        • If it exists, whether it survives bodily death.
        • If it survives, whether it is immortal.
    2. Physicalism: A person is entirely a physical body — no separate immaterial soul exists. A person is purely a physical body but specifically one capable of performing certain functions (thinking, reasoning, feeling, communicating, planning, etc.). Such a body is termed a “P-functioning body.” - Implication: The person ceases to exist upon bodily death unless bodily functions or consciousness are somehow restored.

Lecture 3: Arguments for the existence of the soul, Part I

  • Physicalism clarified:
    • A “mind” for physicalists is not a separate entity. It is simply a way of referring to the body’s capabilities — thinking, reasoning, creativity, and emotional states.
    • Analogy to “smile”: A smile isn’t an extra nonphysical entity; it’s just a bodily function.
  • Physicalism vs. Dualism on Death:
    • Dualism: Death is separation of soul (mind) from body.
    • Physicalism: Death is simply the breakdown of the body’s ability to perform these essential functions (“P-functions”).
  • How to argue for the existence of souls (Dualism):
    • Since souls are immaterial, direct sensory observation (seeing, touching) won’t work.
    • The primary method used is “inference to the best explanation,” positing unseen entities (like atoms or germs) to explain observable phenomena.
  • Inference to Best Explanation (IBE):
    • We justify belief in unseen entities when they provide the best explanation for phenomena (atoms, germs, etc.).
    • For Dualism to be compelling, there must be some feature (“Feature F”) of humans that physicalism either can’t explain or explains inadequately.
  • Possible “Feature Fs” proposed and their critiques:
    • Animation and purposeful behavior of bodies: Initially argued that souls might explain bodily animation.
    • The physicalist response: a functioning body or brain (like a computer CPU) can sufficiently explain purposeful movements without souls.
    • Beliefs, desires, and reasoning: Suggestion that only souls could enable genuine reasoning, goals, and desires.
    • But modern examples (like chess-playing computers) illustrate that purely physical systems seem capable of beliefs, desires, and rational decision-making.
    • Emotion and subjective feeling (next argument): Perhaps the physical body alone can’t experience real emotional states. This opens a new argument focusing on whether emotions require something non-physical.
  • Core Challenge to Dualism:
    • Physicalism continually offers plausible purely physical explanations for features previously thought to require a non-physical soul, making Dualism increasingly difficult to justify through inference.