Theo Todman's Web Page - Paper Abstracts

Philosophers Index Abstract

1. This paper is concerned with the "Epicurean view": that, as dead persons do not exist, death cannot intelligibly be regarded as an evil for the person who dies.
2. After showing that neither the claim that death, while not a "positive" evil, can nonetheless be viewed as an ordinary evil of deprivation, nor Nagel's claims that recipients of evils need not suffer and that values can be relational, succeed in refuting the epicurean view, the author argues that this view can be successfully attacked by adopting a framework that takes a four-dimensional view of the universe, a framework of the sort advocated in Quine's "physical objects."