About the Course
There is one thing I can be sure of: I am going to die. But what am I to make of that fact? This course will examine a number of issues that arise once we begin to reflect on our mortality. The possibility that death may not actually be the end is considered. Are we, in some sense, immortal? Would immortality be desirable? Also a clearer notion of what it is to die is examined. What does it mean to say that a person has died? What kind of fact is that? And, finally, different attitudes to death are evaluated. Is death an evil? How? Why? Is suicide morally permissible? Is it rational? How should the knowledge that I am going to die affect the way I live my life? view class sessions >>
Course Structure:
This Yale College course, taught on campus twice per week for 50 minutes, was recorded for Open Yale Courses in Spring 2007.
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About Professor Shelly Kagan
Shelly Kagan is Clark Professor of Philosophy at Yale. After receiving his B.A. from Wesleyan University in 1976, and his Ph.D. from Princeton University in 1982, he taught at the University of Pittsburgh and the University of Illinois at Chicago before coming to Yale in 1995. He is the author of the textbook Normative Ethics, which systematically reviews alternative positions concerning the basic rules of morality and their possible foundations, and The Limits of Morality, which challenges two of the most widely shared beliefs about the requirements of morality. He is currently at work on The Geometry of Desert.
How to use these pages:
This folder contains course content in HTML format for offline viewing. From this "start" page you can access all of the class sessions by clicking on the link above. The Syllabus page and course resources can be accessed directly from the "contents" folder. If your computer is connected to the Internet, the audio and video files will be accessible via their respective links. To watch or listen to the lectures offline, please download the desired file from the Downloads page on each course.
The folder labeled "IMS" contains a content package of the course files that meet the standards and specifications of the IMS Global Learning Consortium. IMS aims to establish interoperability across multiple platforms for learning systems and learning content. Please visit http://www.imsglobal.org/ for more information.
Yale University 2008. Some rights reserved. Unless otherwise indicated on this page, the pages contained within this folder or on the Open Yale Courses website, all content on this page is licensed under a Creative Commons License (Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0). Please see the Terms of Use page for more information.
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