PHLB07H3 Lecture Notes - Lecture 18: The Fading, The Doomsday Scenario, Harry Frankfurt
Document Summary
Week 10 lecture #18: wednesday march 08, 2017. Death and the afterlife commentaries - susan wolf, harry frankfurt & seana shiffrin. Suppose you knew that, although you yourself would live a normal life span, the earth would be completely destroyed thirty days after your death in a collision with a giant asteroid. How would this knowledge affect your attitudes during the remainder of your life ? (18, empahsis added) Without confidence that others will live on after we ourselves have died, many on the things that now matter to us would cease to do so or would come to matter less (107). Circumstances of value = the conditions under which the attitude of valuing comes to play an important role in human life (99). What do we need in our lives; we need 2 things: temporal scarcity precisely not an immortal life, the existence of the afterlife confidence that other humans will live on after our own.
