Socrates/Plato suggested that doing philosophy involves preparing for death. (Phaedo 67e). Cicero and Montaigne made similar claims; the latter wrote an essay on the topic.
But what did they mean? Well, one way to prepare for something is to think carefully about it. Let’s try to think carefully about death.
According to the termination thesis (TT), if a person dies, that person ceases to exist. The event of death terminates one’s existence. Death is the great terminator. (Sorry, Arnold.) On the TT, at death, one is annihilated (i.e., expunged, deleted) from the realm of existence. One does not continue to exist as a corpse, soul, or anything else. One is existentially done.
But consider:
Suppose you give money to a charitable organization. For the giving to be successful (in the sense of being completed or achieved), the organization must receive your gift. You send the funds on Monday at 10 AM ET. You die on Monday at 1 PM ET – three hours later. The charity receives your gift at 10 AM ET on Tuesday – 24 hours after you sent it.
In this case, arguably, your gift is successful at a time after your death. You succeed at 10 AM ET on Tuesday when you are dead. Moreover, plausibly, one must exist at the time of one’s success in order to succeed at anything, do anything, possess the property of being successful, or possess any properties at all. (Call this the existence thesis, or ET.) Hence, you exist when you are dead.
Is my little story a counterexample to TT? I am, of course, making debatable assumptions, such as ET (the thesis, not the extraterrestrial) and that an act of giving is successful only when complete.
Thoughts?
(For example, one might hold the TT, distinguish between existence and being, and claim that one continues to have being after death, though one ceases to exist at death.)
Yes, I would be inclined to the Meinongian thesis IF I weren’t some sort of dualist. I am actually going through Yourgrau’s “Death and Nonexistence”. A great read.
I wonder if I could accept Yourgrau’s main thesis while maintaining my dualist inclinations. 🤔
A good biography, such as Monk's on Bertrand Russell, say, can capture the essence of the person, irrespective of their existential status. But to insist that Russell is now a nonexistent concrete object is surely a nonsense. Anything describable as a "concrete object" thereby exists or existed. There was once a concrete object (concrete as opposed to abstract, I take that to mean) that, being human, we gave the name "Bertrand Russell" to and, being an organism, was once alive. Once Russell died, he ceased to exist, persist or subsist, but the concrete object persisted for while before presumably decomposing and so ceasing to exist. I like to think that Russell, Quine, and others put paid to Meinong's distinction between existence and subsistence. I also like to think that, despite all this, there might still exist a question of what the first person experience of death is. Is it simply like going into a dreamless sleep and never waking up?