耶鲁公开课死亡字幕2.docx

1、耶鲁公开课死亡字幕2耶鲁公开课死亡字幕2Death: Lecture 2 Transcript January 18, 2007 back Professor Shelly Kagan: The first question we want to discuss has to do with the possibility of my surviving my death. Is there life after death? Is there a possibility that I might still exist or survive after my death? Now at fi

2、rst glance-and in fact, I think, at second glance its going to turn out to be true-you might think that the answer to this question would depend on two basic issues. Do I survive my death? Do we survive our deaths? You think, the first thing we have to get clear on is well what am I? What kind of a

3、thing am I? Or generalizing, what kind of thing is a person? What are we made of? What are our parts? It seems plausible to think that before we could answer the question, Do I survive? we need to know how Im built. And so the first thing were going to spend a fair bit of time on is trying to get cl

4、ear on whats a person? What are the fundamental building blocks of a person? The second question that you might think wed want to get clear on is, Whats the idea, or whats the concept, of surviving? Before we ask, Do I survive? we need to get clear on What am I? and What is it to survive? What is it

5、 for something that exists in the future to be me? Now this question can be discussed philosophically in quite general terms. Whats the nature of persistence of identity over time? But since were especially interested in beings like us, people, this topic, this sub-specialized version of the questio

6、n of identity, gets discussed under the rubric of the topic, personal identity. Whats the key or the nature or the basis of personal identity? As we might put it: What is it for somebody whos here next week to be the same person as me? Whats the nature of personal identity? So, as I say, at first gl

7、ance you might think to get clear on the answer, Do I or might I or could I survive my death? we need to know, what am I? Whats a person? Whats the metaphysical composition of people, on the one hand? And we need to get clear on the nature of identity or persistence or, more specifically, personal i

8、dentity. Now as I say, I believe that when push comes to shove, we do need to get clear about both of those questions and so thats going to take the first several weeks of the class. Were going to spend a couple of weeks talking about, Whats a person? And then were going to spend several weeks, or a

9、t least a week or so, talking about the nature of personal identity. But before we can even get started, theres a question, really an objection to the whole enterprise. So were about to spend a lot of time asking the philosophical question: Is there life after death? Could there be life after death?

10、 Might I survive my death? But theres a philosophical objection to the entire question. And the objection is fairly simple. It says the whole question is misconceived. Its based on a confusion. Once we see the confusion, we can see what the answer to our question is. Could I survive my death? The an

11、swer has got to be-this is what the objection says-the answer has got to be, obviously not. All right, so heres the objection. I should mention that the very first reading that youre going to be doing is a couple of pages from Jay Rosenberg, a contemporary philosopher. He gives us a version of this

12、objection. So Ill give you one version. Youll have another version in your readings. The objection basically says: What does it mean to say that somebodys died? Were asking, Is there life after death? What does it mean to say that somebody has died? Well a natural definition of death might be someth

13、ing like the end of life. So then, if thats right, then to ask, Is there life after death? is just asking, Is there life after the end of life? The answer to that ought to be pretty obvious. Well, obviously, the answer to that is no. After all, if were saying once youve run out of life, is there any

14、 more life? Well, duh! Thats like asking, when Ive eaten up all the food on my plate, is there any food left on my plate? Or what happens in the movie after the movie ends? These are stupid questions, because once you understand what theyre asking, the answer is just built in. It follows trivially.

15、So although it has seemed to people over the ages that the question, Is there life after death? is one of the great mysteries, one of the great philosophical things to ponder, the objection says thats a kind of illusion. In fact, once you think about it, and not all that long, you can see the answer

16、s got to be no. There couldnt possibly be life after death. There couldnt possibly be life after the end of life. Or suppose we ask the question in a slightly different way. Might I survive my death? Well what does the word survive mean? Well, survive is something like we say that somebodys a surviv

17、or if somethings happened and they havent died. Theyre still alive. When theres a car accident, you ask, so-and-so died, so-and-so survived. This person survived. To say that they survived is just saying that theyre still alive. So, Might I survive my death? is like asking, Might I still be alive af

18、ter-well whats death? Death is the end of life. So- might I still be alive after Ive stopped living? Might I be one of the people who didnt die when I died? Gosh, the answer to that is, again, duh! No. You couldnt possibly survive your death, given the very definition. It should remind us of-at leas

19、t it reminds me of this joke that you probably told. It seemed hysterical when you were seven. The plane crashes exactly on the border of Canada and the United States. Exactly on the border. Theres dead people everywhere. Where do they bury the survivors? The answer is: You dont bury the survivors.

20、So when youre seven you think, I dont know. Do they bury them in Canada? Do they bury them in America? The answer is: You dont bury the survivors, because survivors are people that havent yet died. So, Can I survive my death? is like asking, Could I not have yet died after鈥? The answer is, of course

21、, you have to have died if you died and you havent survived if youve died. So the question cant even get off the ground. That, at least, is how the objection goes. Now I dont mean to be utterly dismissive of the objection. Thats why I spent a couple of minutes trying to spell it out. But I think the

22、res a way to respond to it. We just have to get clearer about what precisely the question is that were trying to ask. This is something that Rosenberg tries to get clear on as well. So heres my attempt to make the question both a bit more precise, and a question thats an open question. A question we

23、 can legitimately raise. Well, now as you will hear on several occasions over the course of the semester, Im a philosopher. What that means is I dont really know a whole lot of facts. So Im about to tell you a story where I wish I knew the facts. I dont know the facts. If I could really do it right,

24、 Id now open the door and bring in our guest physiologist, who would then provide the facts that Im-what Im about to go is blah, blah, blah. But we have the physiologist come in and hed actually tell us these things. I dont know them. I dont have that person. But take a look at what happens when a b

25、ody dies. Now, no doubt, you can kill people in a lot of different ways. You can poison them, you can strangle them, you can shoot them in the heart. The causal paths that result in death may start different, but I presume that they converge and you end up having a set of events take place. Now what

26、 are those events? This is exactly where I dont really know the details, but I take it its something like: because of whatever the original input was, eventually the bloods no longer circulating and oxygen isnt making its way around the body. So the brain becomes oxygen-starved. Because of the lack

27、of oxygen getting to the cells, the cells are no longer able to carry on their various metabolic processes. Because of this, they cant repair the various kinds of damage they need, or create the amino acids and proteins they need. So as decay begins to set in and the cell structures begin to break d

28、own, they dont get repaired as they would normally do, and so eventually have breakdown of the crucial cell structure and boom, the bodys dead. Now as I say, I dont really know whether thats accurate, the little rough story I just told, but some story like that is probably right. And in typical phil

29、osophical fashion, Ive drawn that story for you up here on the board. See Figure 2.1. So the events that I dont really know the details of, we can just call B1, B2, B3, up through Bn. Before B1 begins, youve got the body working, functioning, in its bodily way-respirating, reproducing the cells, and

30、 so forth and so on. And at the end of the process, by Bn, the bodys dead. B for bodily. B1 through Bn; thats what death is. At least, thats what death of the body is. As I say, its the sort of thing that somebody from the medical school or a biologist or a physiologist or something could describe f

31、or us. So heres the question then. Suppose we call that process death of the body. Call what has occurred by the end of that sequence of events, bodily death. Now heres a question that we can still ask, at least it looks as though we can still ask it. Might I, or do I, still exist after the death of

32、 my body? Might I still exist after bodily death? I dont mean to suggest in any way that we yet know the answer to that question, but at least thats a question that it seems as though we can coherently raise. Theres no obvious contradiction in asking: Might I still exist after the death of my body? The answer could turn out to be no. But at least its not obviously no. If the answer turns out to be no, its going to take some sustained argument to settle it one way or the other. The answer could turn out to b