Epicurus and the singularity of death : defending radical Epicureanism /

In this book Suits (emer., Rochester Institute of Technology) offers a masterful and updated defense of Epicurus's indifference principle, namely, the contention that "death is nothing to us." Approaching his topic from the perspective of scholarly debates on the philosophy of death, Suits re-frames arguments drawn from the Epicurean corpus and merges them with contemporary examples taken from the world of applied ethics and cosmology (e.g., do-not-resuscitate [DNR] orders and zero-dimensional frameworks), thus allowing ancient ethical prescriptions to enjoy renewed application. Melancholy subject matter is made the subject of clear exposition and intriguing forays into the world of thought experiment. Each of the chapters--most of which could be stand-alone resources for those interested in death studies--begins with a crisp, fictional "prelude" intended to attune the reader to the need for adopting a thought-experiment mentality. Suits's deployment is careful: he devotes the first four chapters to foundational arguments, and reserves the last four for experimental applications of "radical Epicureanism" to such subjects as life insurance, DNR orders, and suicide. Suits's wide-ranging study on the singularity of death bears a logic treatise inside it. Summing Up: Essential. Lower-division undergraduates through faculty. --John G. Moore, Lander University