It is most obviously true that we are all going to die. The very fact that anything is alive seems to entail that it is going to die. Death confronts us as an ultimate cancellation and nullification in the face of which one might ask, “what does it matter if I am going to die?”

The chorus in Sophocles’ Oedipus at Colonus says that the best thing is never to have been born at all. This is especially true if one’s life is filled with suffering and then death. Kant, not able to provide a reason why living is so great, simply says that it is the parents’ job to reconcile their children to existence! On the other hand, we have the 20th century philosopher, Martin Heidegger, arguing that we will only be authentically what we are when we take on our own death as the possibility that is the condition of our existence.  

Co-host Rick Lee is fairly confident that death is stupid. When a loved one dies, our thoughts do not go to authenticity but to the fact that it sucks and is painful that there is now a hole, a gap, in my world that cannot possibly be made good again. It’s no wonder that people turn to the hope or wish that all will be made right again in the end. So, in this episode, we ask “what is death?” and what is the “meaning of death?”

We discuss the following thinkers/ideas/texts/etc. in this episode: 

• The music of Burt Bacharach
• Triangle of Sadness (2023 film)
• University of Southern Maine’s philosophy speakers series, funded by a gift from Robert Louden
• Martin Heidegger, Being and Time
• Sophocles, Oedipus at Colonus
• Ernest Becker, The Denial of Death
• Albert Camus, The Myth of Sisyphus
• Steven Nadler, “Spinoza’s Guide to Life and Death”
• Jacques Derrida, The Beast and the Sovereign (Volume 1 and Volume 2)
• Michael Naas, The End of the World and Other Teachable Moments
• Marc Maron‘s 2023 comedy special From Bleak to Dark (currently streaming on HBO)
• Kubler-Ross Five Stages of Grief
• Bella Mackie, “RIP ‘RIP’: we need to be more creative with mourning in the digital age”
• Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics
• Walter Benjamin, On the Concept of History
• Our previous episode on “Memory” (Season 4, Episode 49)
• Mark Twain, Adventures of Huckleberry Finn
• Belinda McLeod, “15 Famous Eulogies from Literature, Movies & History”
• “logrolling” (Urban Dictionary)
• The Society for Phenomenology and Existential Philosophy (aka, SPEP)
• Richard Bernstein
• Alan Schrift
• On the US ban on photographing military coffins
• Martin Haglund, This Life: Secular Faith and Spiritual Freedom 
• The story of the Mahabharata
• Our previous episode on “Bullshit Jobs” (Season 6, Episode 85)