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This book explores the breadth of philosophical interest in life and death during the early modern period. It connects debates in philosophy with the life sciences, linking the study of organisms to the practical aspect of philosophy, and reminding us that that philosophers were concerned with learning how to live and how to die.
List of contents
- Introduction
- I Feeling Alive
- 1: Ursula Renz: The Consciousness of Being Alive as a Source of Knowledge
- II Immortality
- 2: Michael Moriarty: 'The Thought of Death Changes All our Ideas and Condemns our Plans': Early modern Christian philosophical perspectives on death
- 3: Matteo Favaretti Camposampiero: The Banishment of Death: Leibniz's Scandalous Immortalism
- III Learning to Live
- 4: Giuliana di Biase: Human Life as a State of Mediocrity in John Locke
- 5: Lisa Shapiro: Learning to Live a Human Life
- 6: Julie R. Klein: Spinozan Meditations on Life and Death
- IV Learning to Die
- 7: Michael Jaworzyn: 'Meditatio Mortis', Post-Cartesian Conceptions of Life and the Conjunction of Mind and Body
- 8: Piet Steenbakkers: Living Well, Dying Well: Life and Death in Spinoza's Philosophy and Biography
- 9: Piero Schiavo: Prevailing over Death: Democritus and the Myth of a Philosophical Death
- V Suicide
- 10: Sarah Tropper: When the Manner of Death Disagrees with the Status of Life. The Intricate Question of Suicide in Early Modern Philosophy
- 11: Teresa Tato Lima: David Hume's Philosophical Approach to Suicide
- 12: John J. Callanan: Less than Zero: Kant's Opposition to Suicide
- VI Inanimate and Animate
- 13: Barnaby R. Hutchins: 'Everyone knows what life is': Life as an Irreducible in and outside of Descartes' Metaphysics and Biology
- 14: Steph Marston: Affect and Effect: Spinoza on Life
- 15: Charles T. Wolfe: Vitalism and the Metaphysics of Life: The Discreet Charm of Eighteenth Century Vitalism
About the author
Susan James is Professor of Philosophy at Birkbeck College London. Her main areas of interest are early modern philosophy, feminist philosophy, political philosophy, and the philosophy of art. Her publications include Passion and Action: The Emotions in Early-Modern Philosophy (Oxford, 1997), Spinoza on Philosophy Religion and Politics: The Theological-Political Treatise (Oxford, 2012); and Spinoza on Learning to Live Together (Oxford, 2020).
Summary
This book explores the breadth of philosophical interest in life and death during the early modern period. It connects debates in philosophy with the life sciences, linking the study of organisms to the practical aspect of philosophy, and reminding us that that philosophers were concerned with learning how to live and how to die.
Additional text
A fascinating book
