New Philosopher

Thinking about your death

You can only really understand your life if you’re prepared to think about death – your death, the limit of your own existence. Otherwise you’re going to spend your days in a dreamy state, acting as if this conscious experience is going to continue forever, ignoring that it has an inevitable end point. The older you get, the more people you know will have died. It’s as if nature has arranged it so that you gradually become acclimatised to other people dying, and then you will die yourself, not entirely unaware of what the process of dying might involve, and the effect your

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Michael Cholbi is Professor and Personal Chair in Philosophy at the University of Edinburgh. He has published widely in ethical theory, practical ethics, and the philosophy of death and dying. His books include Suicide: The Philosophical Dimensions,
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