Heidegger and Nagel on Death and Dying

I was recently invited to write a short article for the University of York Philosophy Society’s philosophy magazine, Dialectic, on the subject of life and death. This has since come out in print and online, and can be found here.

Having read Heidegger’s treatment of death in Being and Time (upon which I have blogged on a previous occasion), as well as given a seminar presentation of Thomas Nagel’s treatment of the subject in the final chapter of The View From Nowhere, I thought it might be nice to try and combine the two. Due to length restrictions (1,000 words!), I couldn’t go into any great detail, but I hope the resulting piece gives at least a flavour of the two thinkers in question as well as some of the issues—both personal and philosophical—that arise when reflecting upon the nature and inevitability of our own deaths.

Write One to Throw Away

A technique sometimes employed in developing computer software that occurred to me might equally have an application in philosophy is that of rapid prototyping. This typically involves constructing a ‘quick-and-dirty’ version of the system you’re trying to develop that mimics how many of its main features will work, but without all the effort that goes into constructing the fully working version. Consequently, many details of the prototype will be missing or inaccurate, and its implementation is likely to be of sub-standard quality. Nevertheless, the process of building such a prototype has several benefits. Firstly, you get to see roughly what the finished product will look like well before it’s actually complete, thus giving you the opportunity to gather feedback, refine the design, and so on early on in the development cycle—i.e. before various key decisions become too entrenched to change easily. Secondly, the experience that you gain from constructing the prototype will itself help to inform decisions about the construction of the final system, even if it’s a matter of how not to do things rather than providing a positive role model.

Perhaps the most important feature of such a prototype, however, is that it is built to be thrown away. This enables one to take all kinds of shortcuts that wouldn’t normally be acceptable but without this negatively affecting the quality of the final product. Indeed, it’s generally considered to be a Bad Idea to use a prototype as a basis for the final system. This is partly because it’s likely to constitute a rather shaky foundation given that it was created rapidly with relatively little concern for its internal structure, but also because after creating the prototype you are in a much better position to see how the same task could be achieved a whole lot better the second time around. In other words, when it comes to prototypes, what matters isn’t so much the end product as the experience that you gain through creating it.

Work in Progress Seminar

I gave a talk at last week’s graduate work in progress (WiP) seminar on Williamson’s account of knowledge and some of the issues I’ve blogged about here recently. In particular, I developed an objection concerning the explanatory value of Williamson’s account, which I then tried to defend the account against on the basis of the burden of proof argument given below.

I think it would be fair to say that my suggestions met with mixed reactions. On the one hand, not everyone felt that I was being fair to Williamson by characterising his account as saying nothing particularly substantive about the nature of knowledge given the fact that he had written an entire book on the subject. On the other hand, some found it difficult to accept that there could be a satisfying explanation of something—in this case whether a given belief either does or does not constitute knowledge—without providing a complete set of necessary and sufficient conditions, which was exactly the position I was arguing against. Conversely, others felt that the constraints upon a theory of knowledge I set up begged the question against the Williamsonian view, even though I was claiming that these constraints could be met by the view provided that they are not interpreted too strongly (i.e. as mandating a set of general principles for knowledge, rather than the requirement to give a principled explanation of each of its instances).