Simon Critchley on the History of Death (transcript) Transcript Question: How do contemporary societies conceive of death? Critchley: Every culture has had rituals around death, all right. Question: How did the Greeks conceive of death? Critchley: Philosophy begins with Plato, with Plato’s transcriptions of these dialogues. Biocentrism Explains Why There’s No Time and No Death Okay, I admit it. They had me at “You won’t actually die.” I want to believe. The idea sprang from Lanza’s observation of a spider monitoring its web. In a column Lanza and Berman wrote for Aeon, they say “It turns out that everything we see and experience is a whirl of information occurring in our head… Rather, space and time are the tools our mind uses to put it all together.” The authors cite a range of intellectual luminaries who themselves had doubts about times’ reality, including Albert Einstein, who wrote on the passing of his friend Michele Besso, “Now he has departed from this strange world a little ahead of me. British physicist Julian Barbour also says time isn't real: “Quite the contrary, time is an abstraction at which we arrive through the changes of things.” In biocentrism, we could think of time like a CD music album: All the music’s all there all the time; the only thing that changes, essentially, is which song we listen to. Headline image: Phillip Pessar
List of unusual deaths This is a list of unusual deaths. This list includes unique or extremely rare circumstances of death recorded throughout history, noted as being unusual by multiple sources. Some of the deaths are mythological or are considered to be unsubstantiated by contemporary researchers. Oxford Dictionaries defines the word "unusual" as "not habitually or commonly occurring or done" and "remarkable or interesting because different from or better than others."[1] Some other articles also cover deaths that might be considered unusual or ironic, including List of entertainers who died during a performance, List of inventors killed by their own inventions, List of association footballers who died while playing, List of professional cyclists who died during a race and the List of political self-immolations. Antiquity[edit] Middle Ages[edit] Renaissance[edit] 18th century[edit] 19th century[edit] 20th century[edit] 1920s[edit] 1950s[edit] 1960s[edit] 1961: U.S. 1970s[edit] 1980s[edit] 1990s[edit]
Alan Watts on Death, in a Beautiful Animated Short Film by Maria Popova “Think about that for a while — it’s kind of a weird feeling when you really think about it…” Philosopher and writer Alan Watts (1915-1973) is best-known for authoring the cult-classic The Way of Zen and popularizing Eastern philosophy in the West alongside John Cage. In this hauntingly beautiful animation based on a Watts lecture, produced by Luke Jurevicius and directed by Ari Gibson and Jason Pamment, Watts considers what death might be, exploring the notion of nonexistence and pitting it as “the necessary consequence of what we call being.” UPDATE: A reader points out that the animation comes from a video for “Sometimes the Stars” by Australian band The Audreys from their 2010 debut album of the same title. What you see here is a mashup of the video and an Alan Watts recording. What’s it gonna be like, dying? Complement with Watts’s poignant probing of what you would do if money were no object. Donating = Loving Brain Pickings has a free weekly newsletter. Share on Tumblr
What to do when an astronaut dies in space Courtesy of Warner Bros. Pictures This article is part of Future Tense, a collaboration among Arizona State University, New America, and Slate. Future Tense explores the ways emerging technologies affect society, policy, and culture. On Thursday, April 9, Future Tense will host an event in Washington, D.C., on the future of space exploration. For more information and to RSVP, visit the New America website. It’s raining in Washington on July 24, 1969. So goes the speech commemorating the deaths of Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin following the first moon landing. How should crew members deal with a colleague’s death on long duration missions? Wolpe, a professor at Emory University and senior bioethicist at NASA, deals with all kinds of unexpected issues pertaining to manned space travel, including the challenges posed by death and dying in microgravity. Nonetheless, NASA has attempted to address the problem of storing bodies in space.
Stati Post-Mortem nell’Islam e nel Buddismo tibetano. Il Barzakh – Le tre Leonesse Gli insegnamenti meditativi a cui fanno riferimento gli scritti del Bardo thödröl riguardano due categorie di tecniche: il processo di compimento (tibet. zokrìm), e il processo di creazione (tibet. kyerìm). Il secondo processo meditativo, diversamente dal primo, è caratterizzato dallo sviluppo dell’immaginazione creativa[9] sostenuta dalla devozione[10]. Fondamentalmente consiste nel visualizzare all’esterno di sé il sambhogakāya o il dharmakāya come una figura divina (solitamente un Buddha, un Bodhisattva a volte uniti alle loro paredre tantriche[11]) – in tibetano yidàm lha (sans. iṣṭadevatā) – e immaginare di fondersi con essa, riconoscendo l’essenziale vacuità di quella forma. Affinché questo processo avvenga non deve verificarsi l’interrogatorio degli angeli[12], Munkar e Nakir (A), che sono così allontanati dalla catena iniziatica dei maestri (arab. Silsila; sans. Parampara), in quanto essa risponde per quel singolo essere, in forza della sua connessione al Principio Supremo.
Animals wrestle with the concept of death and mortality When the Virginia opossum feels threatened, she plays dead. Lying on the ground, curled up into something resembling the foetal position, with her eyes and mouth open and her tongue hanging out, she stops responding to the world. Her body temperature drops. Her breathing and heart rate are severely reduced. Despite the persuasive performance of death, no one would assume that the opossum herself believes that she’s playing dead. Humans have long thought of themselves as the only animal with a notion of mortality. Understanding death does not require grasping its inevitability or its unpredictability, nor does it require understanding that death applies to all living things or being familiar with its underlying physiological causes. The main reason why thanatosis is such a good piece of evidence of predators’ concept of death has to do with the particular complexity exhibited by this behaviour. Tonic immobility functions, firstly, as an anti-detection mechanism.
Victorian Funerals and Mourning Victorian funerals were big business. Indeed, there were funerals pitched at all levels of society. At their most elaborate, they could bring even the great metropolis to a standstill. That the funeral business was an excellent trade can hardly be doubted. In numberless instances the interment of the dead is in the hands of miscreants, whom it is almost flattery to compare to the vulture, or the foulest carrion bird. . . the morality is, in their hands, to use a plain word, robbery. The bereaved were often led into spending more than was either necessary or desirable and paying inflated prices for no purpose other than to increase the profits of those in the industry. While great funerals were, of course, the exception, there seems to have been a funeral available for everyone as evidenced in a mid-century advertisement in The Times that offered six classes of funerals ranging in price from 21 pounds for a first-class burial down to 3 pounds, five shillings for the sixth class.