Books > Humanities > Philosophy > Western philosophy > Modern Western philosophy, c 1600 to the present > Western philosophy, from c 1900 - > Phenomenology & Existentialism
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How Are We to Confront Death? - An Introduction to Philosophy (Paperback)
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How Are We to Confront Death? - An Introduction to Philosophy (Paperback)
Series: Perspectives in Continental Philosophy
Expected to ship within 10 - 15 working days
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Confronting death means looking it squarely in the face.
Contemporary society refuses to do so, preferring to hide it and
hide from it. Funeral rites no longer function as a way to mediate
death or to maintain a link between the living and dead. Today the
disappearance of certain funerary practices attests to the denial
of death as such. They reflect a preference for focusing on
remembering the life of the deceased in order to neutralize death,
thus displacing the value of mourning, now viewed as something to
be done as quickly as possible. Moreover, science, like religion
before it and like the contemporary "cult of the body," has fed our
fantasies about immortality, promising us longer lives of better
quality, and even the possibility of conquering death altogether.
Despite all these attempts to overcome or neutralize death,
humanity has been unable to eliminate its anxiety about death and
nothingness. True to her roots in phenomenology, Dastur not only
examines these contemporary tendencies with a critical eye but also
argues that we must once again learn to assume death, to become
mortal, to learn how to die. Death is not the last moment of human
life, but rather its essential attribute. Dastur's skill as a
"translator" of phenomenology into accessible and clear prose is
nowhere more apparent than in her "little book on death"-indeed,
the intended audience is less those who specialize in phenomenology
or academic philosophy than a nonspecialist public hungry for
philosophical reflection on what is closest to us. And nothing is
closer to us than the ever-present possibility of our own imminent
death. As its subtitle suggests, this book is an "introduction to
philosophy," one that obliges the reader to ask what it means to be
human and to embrace death and mortality as the defining essence of
our humanity.
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