Ancient Greeks: Is death necessary and can death actually harm us?

And there the children of dark Night have their dwellings, Sleep and Death, awful gods. The glowing Sun never looks upon them with his beams, neither as he goes up into heaven, nor as he comes down from heaven. And the former of them roams peacefully over the earth and the sea's broad back and is kindly to men; but the other has a heart of iron, and his spirit within him is pitiless as bronze: whomsoever of men he has once seized he holds fast: and he is hateful even to the deathless gods. Hesiod

Transport of a person who died

Now it is the job of Hermes, Thanatos/Hypnos and Charon to bring the soul in the final place.


Hermes (

Is Death so terrible?

Look back at time … before our birth. In this way Nature holds before our eyes the mirror of our future after death. Is this so grim, so gloomy?
Lucretius

To fear death, my friends, is only to think ourselves wise, without being wise: for it is to think that we know what we do not know. For anything that men can tell, death may be the greatest good that can happen to them: but they fear it as if they knew quite well that it was the greatest of evils. And what is this but that shameful ignorance of thinking that we know what we do not know?


References

· Blackmore, S., 1993. Dying to Live: Near-Death Experiences. Buffalo, NY: Prometheus Books.

· Feldman, F., 1991. “Some Puzzles About the Evil of Death,” The Philosophical Review 100, no. 205-27; reprinted in Fischer 1993, 307-326.

· Fischer, J.M., ed., 1993. The Metaphysics of Death. Stanford University Press.

· Lucretius, 1951. On the Nature of the Universe. Latham, reg. trans., Penguin Classics.

· Parfit, D., 1984. Reasons and Persons. Oxford: Clarendon Press.

· Perry, J., ed., 1975. Personal Identity. Berkeley: University of California Press.

· Pitcher, G., 1984. “The Misfortunes of the Dead,” in American Philosophical Quarterly 21, no. 2, 217-225; reprinted in Fischer 1993, 119-134.

· Silverstein, H., 1980. “The Evil of Death,” Journal of Philosophy 77, no. 7, 401-424; reprinted in Fischer 1993, 95-116.

· Unamuno, M., 1913. Kerrigan, A., Trans., The Tragic Sense of Life in Men and Nations. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1972.

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